


start a fire in the margins

by scrybles



Series: pause the tragic ending (for just a moment more) [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, potentially triggering use of written imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrybles/pseuds/scrybles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Living together is not ideal. They don't fit; they never have. They're less a puzzle and more a pair, and if anything, they match. Word for word and blow for blow, boxing at each others nerves with a quiet sort of malice. Where Harry tries to turn Liam over and reveal his soft underbelly, stabbing at it until all his secrets spill from the wounds or the bile burns his hands. Harry doesn't usually get too far before Liam retaliates in kind, cracking him open and letting the world flood in. It's been that way, always. They'll probably go to the grave gnashing their teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	start a fire in the margins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fannyann](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannyann/gifts).



> so. I would first like to thank a few people before we get started; first and foremost, being the mods over at 1d-bigbang, for organising this entire thing. you guys are saints veritable saints and i thank you for your patience with me. secondly, I would like to thank iman, the artist who had to deal with my...mess of a process and whose artwork was absolutely gorgeous and nothing that I deserved. also, to my future ex-waifu, Em, who had to put up with my constant complaining and angsting and obsessing over this despite having not listened or paid attention to one direction since 2012, and for always willing to have a look at my stuff to make sure it's not completely appalling. i'm not saying i wouldn't have finished this without her, but that's exactly what i'm saying. 
> 
> and finally, i'd like to thank fannyann, but also apologise to fannyann, for whom this fic is dedicated. nearly two years ago, she requested frenemies lirry sharing and falling in love in a flat with broken heating, and out of that little ficlet i wrote, grew this semi-monstrosity of feelings and mostly misunderstandings and everyone but niall not being very nice to one another. 
> 
> also please please please go check out iman payneomg's lovely lovely art on her [tumblr](http://payneomg.tumblr.com/post/113136070794)! it's completely gorge!

The air is a frigid thing. It creeps along the floorboards from old crevices and cracked glass, seeking out Harry's exposed bits and biting at him like a pin-toothed pest. Nothing can keep winter out, the cold settling beneath his skin like ice running through his veins, his fingers stiff and slow as they crawl across the keys of his laptop. Harry wishes all his parts were warm. Warm like his back pressed against hot metal grooves, and a duvet draped around him. Warm like a fever, or a dream, or breath caught into the crook of his neck. Not this suffocating in ice, constant and aching and _grim_.

Every so often he'll glance forlornly at the fireplace, dusty from disuse and only ever good for letting cold air in, rubbing his palms together and blowing into the tiny space. Like maybe he can breathe a fire between his hands, catch it and hold it close to his chest. Only the heat doesn't last. It seeps from Harry like he's bleeding all over, from a million little paper cuts prickled into his skin. It leaves, and the cold sinks deep. Maybe to his bones, or even to his soul. Definitely to his mind. Numbing, even as he curls up next to the heater.

His phone splits the silence, the quiet patter of his steady typing. Cleaves it right in two, the shake and shriek of it rattling obnoxiously next to him. And the words ring out, Harry mouthing at them absently, getting lost in the sound against the walls, before the phone falls mute just as the chorus ends. Harry doesn't even realise, his mind is so far away. Seeking places where the sun is a constant stay and walking barefoot means burning the soles of your feet.

It's not until it rings again, maybe for the third time, or the fourth, the rattling somehow more furious each time he misses it. It's not until it's vibrating against the edge of his blanket, that Harry finally remembers that Lost In The World is Liam's ringtone and not running a loop inside his head.

Harry reaches reluctantly from the cocoon of his duvet, grasping for his mobile, blinking at it while it fusses in his hand. He answers, pressing it between ear and shoulder as he continues to type. “And what sort of time might you call this,” Harry posits, throat raspy from a day's neglect. Or a week's. Or some swell of time starting in his chest and ending in winter.

“ _Finally_ ,” Liam huffs, breath short and voice impatient as it crackles through the speaker. “Let me in, it's bloody freezing.”

“Tell me, Liam. Do you like keeping me up all night? It's been forever, I almost filed a missing person's.” Talking is a stretch, pulling at Harry's throat like dry rope. But he can't stop. Can't stop himself from mumbling forward, like rolling down a hill made of mud, words slipping under him as he tumbles and tumbles. “You shouldn't worry your friends like that.”

Liam sniffles a bit, probably wipes at his face with his arm. And he groans at Harry, low and unhappy. “Who told you we were friends? Whoever it was, you should definitely cuff them. Or at least cuss them.”

Harry ignores him. “What ever happened to your keys, I wonder.”

“Would you just buzz me in, you git.”

There's a ruffling on the other end, like a burst of arctic wind and Liam's jacket scratching against brick as he huddles in the entryway, hissing at him from five floors below. “That can't be them,” Harry says, “Sitting on the coffee table. Can it?”

“Eurgh, Harry.”

“I mean, that's so unlike you. To leave things lying around like that. Not especially when you won't be around for two weeks.”

“ _Harry_. I'm too cold and I'm too wet.”

“Oh? Really?”

“If I get sick, I'm coming for everything you own. I'll gob over all of it, I swear.”

Harry hums into the phone, leaning his cheek against the radiator as if it might defrost the corners of his skull, until his thoughts melt away and his body along with it. “Mm, you sure know how to chat a girl up, Liam Payne.”

“If I have to call your mum I'll make sure you regret it,” Liam threatens.

“Alright, alright. Don't be such a dick,” Harry concedes, with little more than a sigh.

“Pot. Kettle.”

“Cauldron. Crucible,” Harry mutters, pulling his duvet tight around his shoulders as he stands.

Liam snorts. “Do you just talk to talk, or are you really as insufferable as you seem?”

“Shut up,” he hangs up. He makes nary a sound, shuffling across the flat without any sort of urgency, two layers of socks bunching at his ankles, the only thing keeping his toes from freezing to the floor. He reaches for the buzzer, presses it quick. Too quick for anyone to grab for the door in time, much less open it, almost sure Liam is planning to strangle him the second he steps over the threshold. Harry does it again, and again, and once more for good measure. Just to be a prick, and just because. If he's gonna die anyway, strangled and frozen and probably mollywopped a dozen times beforehand, he might as well die amused, even if only slightly. And when they find his smiling corpse, Liam's fingers marked into his neck, Harry reckons it'll be beautiful. Like the simple pleasure of plucking at Liam's nerves.

A yelp is pulled straight from his chest when a thud shakes the front door, thundering through Harry as he devolves into a fit of soft giggles. Liam must have gotten in and run up while Harry was busy attempting to be a nuisance. It's not out of the ordinary for Liam to slip beneath the wire while Harry is distracted.

“Harry Edward Styles,” Liam says slowly, like a warning and a promise, muffled by the thick oak door between them.

“Liam James Payne,” he answers facetiously.

“Open the door, Harry.”

“If you promise not to aim for my face,” Harry says, lips smiling into the wood. “Can't be starting term with a black eye.”

“I make absolutely no promises.”

With a surprising lack of regard for his own physical well-being, Harry cracks the door open, peeking out with wide eyes at Liam's best unimpressed stare. He has so many now, what with Zayn Malik being his best mate. There's only so many years you spend knowing a person before their glares become yours. Liam stands there, shoulders hunched forward and hood pulled up, looking as damp and cold as London in the night. He looks like a bitter winter, and Harry kind of doesn't want to let him in, still. If he looks carefully, Harry swears he can see the steam rolling off Liam's shoulders, wisps of it reaching out to choke him from the inside.

“Hi,” Harry smirks, hair falling into his eyes.

Before the door even swings fully open, Liam is charging him, tackling Harry to the floor. Their bodies thump against the creaking floorboards, blankets tangling beneath them as Liam lays jabs all along Harry's arms and chest. And they struggle like that for awhile, Harry bucking and pushing and wheezing through laughs while Liam pins him down by the hips, with hands well versed in flattening Harry out. But Harry always plays a dirtier game, trying his best to smack at Liam's dick through the flurry of hands and fists and knees flying about, landing hits somewhere near his belly, making Liam grunt but doing very little to deter him.

Though Harry never admits, it doesn't take Liam long to have him sprawled out, limbs all spread, biceps aching under the press of his palms. And Liam is familiar on top of him, all calm fury and bridled heat, making something buzz beneath Harry's skin, incessant and frustrating. The cold fleeing from his flesh whenever they stand near, or claw at each other, or both. Always both.

“You're such a git,” Liam rasps, Harry still wriggling under him.

“Says the man pummelling an innocent boy into the floor.”

“You're no boy,” Liam responds incredulously.

“And you're really no man.”

“ _Such a git_.”

Liam glares down at him, thumbs making dents of Harry's arms. And there's a rush between his ears and underneath his cheeks, like waves or radiation, something about Liam's gaze that makes all the cold go away. And all Harry can think is, _you'rehereyou'rehereyou'rehere_.

“A pretty git,” Harry says, too confident for someone currently pinned to the floor.

Liam rolls his eyes, and pushes off him, the heels of his palms digging into Harry's chest and leaving him wanting for breath, only to be filled with icy, sharp air. It's the meanest thing Liam's done all night, and he doesn't even know it.

“Help me with my stuff,” Liam says, turning in the doorway and leaning against the frame.

“Nuh-uh.” Harry rolls himself up in his blankets again, crawling back to his laptop and to the radiator, as the frost begins to set in, and as the gap between them widens, Harry only feels colder. “Too cold,” he mumbles.

“What are you doing,” Liam questions, bemused, while Harry tries to make himself comfortable again, or at least something close to it. He leans against the heater, shoulder blades seeking those grooves where they pressed, pulling his legs up to his chest. The cold is unsettling, and it makes Harry feel like he's dying slow and quiet, wandering his own tomb before oblivion's even set it.

“Pilates,” he answers flatly, cutting his eyes at Liam. “What do you think? I'm getting warm, innit.”

“You're weird.” Liam hovers in the doorway for a moment, looking at Harry like he's the most unusual kind of cadaver. One that he can't decide if he wants to dissect or leave to putrefy. “And annoying. But mostly weird.”

“I'm a genuis.”

“Well _genius_ , try not to fall asleep there. Wouldn't want your pretty face to melt off before morning.”

“Oh, Liam,” Harry sighs dramatically. “You really _do_ think I'm pretty?”

Liam shrugs as he backs out the door, presumably to drag his luggage from the hallway. “I don't think anything, Harry. Not about you.”

And whoever thinks Liam Payne's the nicest kind of guy, has clearly never met him. Harry can't say he doesn't deserve it.

\- - -

That's somewhere near the middle, though.

They share a flat. They have done for a whole term now, orbiting each other like planets and moons and colliding stars, caught up in each other's gravity and too alike for either of them to break away. Spinning ever close until the inevitable crash, shaking each other apart with the force of words and silent wars, only to reform themselves and start the entire dance again.

Living together is not ideal. They don't fit; they never have. They're less a puzzle and more a pair, and if anything, they match. Word for word and blow for blow, boxing at each other's nerves with a quiet sort of malice. Where Harry tries to turn Liam over and reveal his soft underbelly, stabbing at it until all his secrets spill from the wounds or the bile burns his hands. Harry doesn't usually get too far before Liam retaliates in kind, cracking him open and letting the world flood in. It's been that way, always. They'll probably go to the grave gnashing their teeth.

They grew up across from each other, after all, with their windows always facing, Harry getting glimpses into the dark of Liam's room, picking out all the details and collecting them. Committing them to ink and saving them for something later. Locked away, behind tangles of words and uneven stanzas. Except, growing up next to Liam doesn't mean growing up _with_ Liam. Ever since they were children there's been some divide, not very great and not very wide, but there all the same. Like standing alongside one another, parallel but never touching.

He's always sort of liked Liam, and maybe that's part of the problem. Because he likes pulling Liam apart even better. Drawing out those complications and contradictions and laying them onto paper. Except, frustratingly, Liam doesn't really have contradictions. He's as straightforward as he is genuine, which should bore Harry to death, yet only serves to fuel some crusade within him, seeking out the intricacies, twisting beneath Liam's skin like vines. Harry knows they're there. Hidden in Liam's blood and coursing like fire, scorching and chaotic. Rarely do they bloom to the surface. Harry has to cut and slice and stab with surgical precision to force those traces of Liam out.

It's a game really. And not one Harry plays particularly well, considering he's no closer to figuring Liam out, not since the day they met. Not in all the years they've known each other. Because ultimately, seeing blood is not seeing inside. It's not vivisection, as much as Harry claims or believes. Rather, Harry plays a game. Plays it a lot. And he never wins because there's no sudden epiphanies, and no comprehension. There's no winning.

They're not friends.

\- - -

_all slants and curves that make up the angles of his jaw, strong. Strong as fuck, and sharp like a tongue is sharp, but without wit. A witless face but a remarkable face. Strong._

_Imagine, if you will, a contemplation. A relief in the face of a stone wall, and a palm wandering over bumps and curves and angles, searching for an opening that isn't there. And there's music in the way that skin slides over stone, in the grit and silt. There's beauty. And something behind it. Like the earth sings, and taunts, light and noise in the cracks. Light in the–_

“This,” Louis announces, slapping a hand on the table and startling everyone within earshot. Everyone but Harry, since he's no longer surprised by anything Louis does. He glances around his laptop screen for the briefest moment before going back to mashing furiously at his keyboard and watching something like sentences come out. He has four essays due by the end of the week, and he's waited until the eleventh hour to get them all done. He's not done a single one yet, obviously—not even close—but it's helpful to at least pretend he is.

Anyway, that's beside the point. Though Harry may not be surprised by Louis' antics anymore, he hasn't enough time to breathe in between keystrokes, much less consider entertaining them.

“What about it,” Harry asks distractedly, in a bid to appease Louis' thirst for attention. He doesn't beg for it often, so it's probably best not to ignore him, lest Louis display his affinity for theatrics. There's a reason he's chair of the drama society, despite not actually taking drama.

“Would you pay attention!”

Harry barely gets his fingers from under the screen as Louis slams the laptop shut and glares at him from across the table. Shushes erupt from the people around them, and Harry has visions of his bum sitting on the curb outside because The London Library has once and for all decided that Harry is more trouble than his exorbitant membership fee is worth. 

“I was writing,” Harry mumbles quietly. It's a lie. He was floundering. Can he really be any more pathetic? It's taken him his entire adolescent life to realise he's had a problem. What exactly that problem may be, he has yet to pinpoint. But he knows he has one.

“You're always writing.” It's less of a complaint and more of an accusation, woven into the blue of his eyes, half-lidded and unimpressed. Louis knows him too well for having only met him five months ago.

“What do you want, Louis? You have my attention now, almost taken my fingers off too boot.”

“I have just recently come to the conclusion, that you are seriously fucked up,” Louis tells him, fingertips pressing into the table like it might burn the message there, the one Louis is currently trying to drive home.

“Only just?”

“I had my suspicions,” he says, offhand like he knows Harry is attempting to throw him off course. “Anyway, the point is, _this_ ,” he snatches up the leaf of paper sliding under his fingers the entire time, “makes me realise you're either sadistic, or just plain sociopathic.”

“I'm curious as to how you've arrived at such a wild conclusion,” Harry says.

“It's like you do it on purpose,” Louis talks over him, flipping off the students down the way who shush them and bitch beneath their breaths about end of term exams. “I mean, a party? Really, Harold?”

“Are you saying Liam is incapable of having a good time?”

“I'm saying you are incapable of letting him.” Louis folds his arms up into his jumper.

Harry isn't the type to sneer, but something in the way Louis looks down at him, eyebrows bunched together and lips pressed into a tight, thin line, makes Harry's own mouth pull at the corners. There's a mess of words swirling inside him, and Harry lets the noise of them fill his head in an effort to block out Louis' nattering. It doesn't help much seeing as he sidles right on up next to Harry, leaning back into the table, thigh grazing the rough fabric of Harry's tatty jumper. 

“I've known Liam all of six weeks, and I already know that you,” Louis prods him in the temple, to which Harry frowns even deeper, “cannot let him live.”

“It's a party, Louis. Not a bloody assassination.”

“That would probably be more merciful.”

Harry shifts in his seat, the pierce of Louis' gaze boring beneath his skin and wriggling its way into the back of his mind. What exactly does he want? What does he want Harry to say? He's spent the better part of a decade pestering Liam for attention, what else does Harry know but that?

“It will end in tears and drunken blackouts, I'm telling you now,” warns Louis, voice low and foreboding. He pulls at the collar of his jacket, moves to tighten his scarf around his neck before standing up straight. 

Harry unfolds his laptop, watches as the screen lights up and the jumble of words (which have nothing to do with Romanticism of early 18th century English literature) sit in his open word document. “So you'll be there by ten?”

Louis scoffs. “Obviously.”

He sweeps out of the Library, leaving a flurry of loose paper, hot glares, and confusion in his wake, most of which belongs to Harry. Nearly all, if not for the irritated onlookers breathing a sigh of relief at Louis' exit, going back to squinting into their thick and dusty tomes. Something uneasy settles over Harry, the quiet of the library and the flipping of pages no longer a comfort. 

Honestly, what does that git know?

\- - -

Sometimes Liam sings. It's mostly by accident, Harry discovers after the first few times.

He'll be lost in a fog, with all these notions and nothing to say, staring at his laptop for hours before writing a lonely sentence that only ever gets struck from existence. Harry'll wallow for hours, staring at the wall like it's a thousand kilometres away and the only way to get there is to sit and wait. And Liam never notices, Harry blending into the scenery like he's no different from the sofa or the side table. 

At first he'll start low, humming curiously while he follows the tiny print in a thick book, careful to contemplate each thought and each idea trying to reach him across time through the written word. And eventually it becomes a little nothing-melody, turns its way in the space between Liam's chest and his throat, bubbling into something greater. Something that makes sense. A song. Any song, really; Usually one that's been on repeat on Liam's iPod the entire week. But sometimes, something sad, and meandering. Some old blues hit from the fifties, or some jazz standard that Harry never recognises. Not until he wakes up on the couch one evening to the chorus of These Foolish Things echoing from the kitchen, Liam's voice soft against the walls but firm in the way it thrums through Harry's body.

It lifts him up, carries Harry over to the kitchen doorway as if his feet never touches floor. Harry clasps onto the frame because his legs feel like jelly, staring at Liam's back as he's bent into the refrigerator. 

Liam jumps when he turns to find Harry standing there, dumbfounded. A blush creeps across his nose, as he apologises. “Sorry,” he says quietly, ducking his head as he leaves the kitchen empty handed. And Harry is transported back to a time when he had yet to grow into his limbs. To when his voice cracked and he used to sneak into Gemma's toilet every morning to steal the concealer he didn't really need.

When Liam would sing out into the Saturday sky, loud and clear as a bell, for all the neighbours to hear, unabashed at how many Frank Sinatra songs he could get through in one afternoon. Would sing to Harry on their way to school, during break, during lunch. Sing into his ear until Harry couldn't stand it anymore and flicked him in the nose. When he used to sleep over; would whisper notes beneath the covers while Harry traced the lyrics into his arm, torch burning hot between their torsos as Harry is eased off to sleep. 

He remembers watching Liam at the winter talent show, dedicating a Justin Timberlake song to Harry, who slid lower and lower in his seat despite grinning like a fool. How the next day, Liam went to school in high spirits and came home with a split lip and the weight of so many names following him. How, slowly, Liam's voice became less boisterous and proud, more serious. How he stopped speaking at all, for awhile, and stopped smiling almost entirely. 

Sorry, Liam had started saying. Sorry for singing, sorry for being different, sorry I bothered, sorry for taking up space, sorry for being here. Sorry sorry sorry sorry, _Sorry I thought it might make you feel better_. It used to drive Harry up the wall, but he's learned to accept the truth of Liam's sadnesses as much as he accepts that Liam doesn't sing so much any more. Not if he can help it, not if anyone is looking. 

Sometimes, though, if Harry is careful he might stumble upon Liam sketching little notes and stanzas in the margins of his notes. Or perhaps he'll hear the same half mumbling run of notes for a whole week. And when Harry asks what song it is, Liam will only stare at him blankly and respond with his own question. “What song?” 

“Forget it,” he'll say, and they both go back to whatever they were doing, flat falling silent save for the sound of Liam's breathing and Harry's world beginning to spin again. These may be the only times Harry doesn't write, mostly because he's too busy straining to hear. 

\- - -

In the dead of winter, Harry wakes up most mornings with his cheek pressed to metal and his head as cottoned up as his mouth, his closely guarded bits and pieces scattered around him like his life's a wreck. Of which the only thing left is a Harry shaped scorch mark in the earth, surrounded by the debris of his choices.

Harry is not very well acquainted with shame. He's aware of it, obviously, _distantly_ , like he's aware of poverty. Or illness. Or celibacy. Louis makes a routine of calling him dissociative, and will dive into dissertation-length analyses of Harry's character. Nick, on the other hand, goes with the ever succinct 'numb'. Liam, though, would question whether Harry was ever able to feel emotion to begin with, which stings more than it should. It's just, that feeling – humiliation marinated in a soupy serving of guilt and sprinkled with regret – it doesn't apply to him. It has never occurred to Harry to feel embarrassed about _anything_. It's a waste of time and energy and faculty, both physical and mental.

Which is probably why Harry finds himself waking up with his cheek stuck to the radiator and Liam ignoring him, more and more often as winter ensues.

 _'Normal people sleep in beds,'_ he can hear his mother chide. _'Normal is subjective...and boring,'_ he'd almost always answer.

Mornings are quiet, _normally_. The only sound is Harry, body groaning and cracking as he rises, like old timbre splitting, joints clicking into place as he bends and stretches and gathers his things. Mobile, laptop, notebook, pens, and papers, all scooped up and balanced precariously in his arms as he keeps his duvet closed between the clasp of his chin and sternum. One cheek burning like a long slap to the face and the other, pallid and drawn against his cheekbone.

Harry wears the red mark on his cheek with pride, flaunting it even as he kicks the leg of Liam's chair upon entering the kitchen. Harry drops his things carelessly onto the table, and then in the seat across from Liam, himself. “You could always wake me, y'know,” he grouses.

Liam nods as if he agrees. He doesn't look at Harry. “I could. But then how might you learn?”

“Learn what? I don't learn anything, ever. I find it clouds one's judgement.”

“Which is why you're reading English at UCL,” Liam wonders aloud, gripping the edges of his book like he might pull himself into it and escape conversing with Harry at all.

Harry continues, however, as if Liam had never spoken. “A fool seeks knowledge, a wise man admits he knows nothing,” Harry states, stealing a few cubes of sugar from the kitschy, purple bowl on Liam's side of the table, plopping two in his mouth to the restrained sound of disapproval. “The desire for knowledge is but one of many obstacles on the path to Nirvana,” Harry says through crunching sugar, somewhat entranced by the twitch at the bow of Liam's lips. The slightest chink in his armour of contrived apathy.

“They're still letting you onto the sixth floor, I see.”

Harry can feel himself frown. “And why wouldn't they?”

His entire experience with the London Library is a contusion on his year. A dull ache at the mere prospect of almost being banned – and also of marginal consequence, arrested – turning sharp whenever someone brings the ordeal up at all. There were a lot of phone calls to the family solicitor and an especially large sum of money which found it's way from his mother's bank account into the library's hands. As well as a number of deafening reprimands by phone and a long freeze on his bank account like winter had already taken over.

Harry's whole September was spent penceless, Anne paying Liam for both their groceries while Harry sat in his room, sullen and bored and unable to do anything for lack of funds.

“I dunno. Maybe after that whole thing where you tried to sneak out with a manuscript of Paradise Lost?”

“That was an accident,” he says, unsure even to his own ears.

“The thievery or the lapse in sanity? I mean, it was under your jumper. You were clutching it like you'd written it yourself.”

“I was under duress. Being near the works of Milton does things to my body.”

“Incendiary things, I'm sure,” Liam says, eyes dutifully avoiding Harry's by remaining tacked to the book in his hands, probably less because Harry makes him nervous and more because he doesn't want to arouse Harry's intrinsic need to bicker. With almost everyone, but with Liam, specifically. “Though, who are we blaming the other ninety-nine percent of the time?”

“Y'know, you're surprisingly annoying,” Harry tells him, flinging granules of sugar at his book, hoping some might catch in the folds and binding, so that Liam may never open it again without it sounding like honeyed sandpaper.

“The irony,” Liam murmurs sullenly, shaking out his book before turning the page.

Harry doesn't pout because, frankly, he's not twelve and no matter what his friends might say, childish displays of dissent are twenty thousand leagues beneath him. He won't sink so low just to snatch a sliver of Liam's attention. Not usually, anyway. “Anyway, why are you here? Don't you meet the sun at the gym or something?”

Liam lifts his book enough that he can flash the title at Harry without a word or a glance. The only explanation he's willing to give.

Harry turns his nose up. He's certainly not above doing that. “There is absolutely no reason that Bolshevist Russia _anything_ should be consumed before noon.”

“How do expect me to learn to tolerate you?”

“You'd think after ten years,” Harry sighs.

“You'd think.”

\- - -

Harry doesn't remember much about that day. It was cold, and he spent the better part of the morning bundled up in the back seat getting into slap fights with his sister over the heating. The drive wasn't very long, he knows that now, but it had felt like an age to him. Because time expands inside young minds, where a year seems like forever and fifty miles means you'll never see your friends again.

But the funny thing is, Harry doesn't remember moving. Not the packing, or the tearful goodbyes, or looking out the rear window to catch a final glimpse of his old street. He doesn't remember before the motorway, the wet hum of the M6 beneath the tyres or the frost against the windshield. He doesn't _really_ remember fighting with Gemma, and pouting into his seatbelt, and tripping in the snow. Only that he's been told so many times, he has no energy to disagree anymore. Doesn't really care enough to. Because as far as he knows, everything starts when he looks up from the ground.

There's a hand, mitten-covered and outstretched. And a boy, whose warm eyes make Harry hungry for all the words he can find, all the words in the world, just so he can describe them. And the haze parting like clouds, and the sun shining from behind him.

The only thing Harry remembers about that day is Liam. It's the only thing important. Harry was eight. He hasn't been able to breathe ever since.

\- - -

After Harry gets up, and throws on something for class, and miraculously _goes_ to class, they don't see each other until the sun has long abandoned their patch of the world and the chill has settled into the ground. School is tedious, as usual, save for bumping into Niall between tutorials and spending a half hour complaining about the weather over hot chocolate. They mumble quietly in the grimy corner of some backalley coffee shop that's less backalley and more clean pavement and sporadic foot traffic. There's maybe mention of flyers and turnouts, and the amount of alcohol Harry has stockpiled. And maybe Niall keeps glancing at him worriedly between sips of his water drowned sugar and bites of cinnamon crumble cake. Maybe Harry mentions the library, and Louis, and almost losing his fingers. Mostly there's grey clouds casting shadows over London, and Harry staring into the dark liquid swirling in his cup, streaks of white spiralling out toward the edge.

When they leave, they stand just outside the door, and Niall curls his fingers into the loose fabric of Harry's scarf and pulls until it's snug against his neck. “Stay cool, mate,” he says, knocking his knuckles against Harry's collar.

“That's the absolute last thing I want to do,” Harry responds, already feeling his jaw tighten to keep his teeth from chattering.

“You know what I mean,” Niall laughs. “Our Louis's a pessimist at best. For him, love is a set of sterile 'paradigms symptomatic of insanity'. You could fill a bleeding novel of all the things he thinks he knows about it.”

“You could fill a novel of all the things I don't.”

When Niall smiles, it's wide. Always with his whole face, open and unguarded. “If ya say so.”

Harry bunks off his last lecture in favour of wandering into Soho, rummaging for moments around the square, watching people bundled up in trendy coats and colourful scarves walking close together as if warmth is something that can be shared out in the open. He sees men strolling hand in hand, stopping only to press kisses into each others mouths. And an angry young mother pushing a pram through the middle of the green, with her boyfriend at her heels, running his gob all the way back into her good graces. And a Chinese boy, who looks out of sorts and uncomfortable, but brave and brand new and like a little more weight lifts from his shoulders every step closer to Old Compton Street.

Harry collects these moments, because he has none of his own. Thieving the lives of others and feeling less guilty about it with every word he commits to paper. He doesn't escape until his bones are thoroughly frozen and a sizeable chunk of his notebook is filled.

By that point, the bouncers have started to take up their stations, hulking and serious amongst a sea of light-on-their-toes, flouncing queens ready to paint the town red. Harry wants to stay, wants to smother himself in the _gaiety_ , but it's far too cold. So he takes the shortcut back to the flat, down the narrow, dank alleyways, crossing the river of people that is Oxford Street, and trudging into the heart of Fitzrovia and the little side-street he calls his own.

Climbing up the stairs takes seconds, even though it doesn't feel that way, and by the time he lands on the fourth floor, Harry is huffing just slightly. The thin, sharp air stings his lungs, and he leans against his front door to catch his breath before unlocking it.

“ _What_ the hell is this?”

Harry's barely through the door before Liam's got him backed into it, a crumpled piece of paper pressed into his chest, hissing and crackling against the fabric of his shirt like Liam's eyes turned against his flesh. “A flyer, _obviously_ ,” Harry says with little patience. Any amount of petulance evaporates, however, with Liam's withering stare, which could probably set Harry ablaze. His mouth goes dry.

“Why is your _name_ on it?” Liam unfurls it, pulling roughly at the edges and shoving it at Harry expectantly.

“[ _Skin up and skin out: a tasteful social gathering for the holiday season (or something very like it)_](http://40.media.tumblr.com/639cbf682524b626cb50bb8742e11b3e/tumblr_nkxf2m5Pvx1rxqg3eo3_250.jpg),” Harry reads aloud, as if to a child. The crease in Liam's brow grows deeper, enough that Harry wants to smooth it out with the pad of his thumb. Wants to redraw the line in the sand so that they're on the same side. Or sweep it away altogether, so that there are no sides. There's just him and Liam, facing each other. “ _Saturday, sunset, Harry's flat,_ ”

And suddenly, there's nothing between them but cold air, Liam backing away with his arms folded and his gaze lost in the floorboards. “Except it's not just Harry's, is it?,” Liam says quietly. “It's also _Liam's_. And _Liam_ had no bloody idea it was happening.”

“Don't blame me if everyone at LSE gets everything too-fucking-late dot com,” Harry defends.

“Are you brain damaged?”

“I'm not the one talking in third person,” Harry says, slipping past Liam before he's cornered again. He clutches the strap of his bag, squeezes the spine of his notebook, and counts the number of Liam's footfalls echoing his own. Following him like some dog with a bone, stopping short at the threshold of Harry's room. Harry discards his bag at the foot of his bed, falling on top of his covers with notebook still in the crease of his arm. He watches Liam linger there, swaying uncertainly between room and corridor as if the doorway is the looking glass and Harry's room is the other side.

“Anyway, why do you care,” Harry asks, shoving his face into his pillow, unable to summon the energy to toe off his shoes and take off his coat. Maybe it's like hiding, and maybe it's all a silly game and Harry feels he can disappear behind the flat of his hands. “Won't you be on a train home by then?”

“I thought,” Liam scrubs a hand over his shorn hair, grabbing for something to say but coming up with fistfuls of nothing. But then, Harry's always been good at taking things from him, especially his words.

Outside the wind is howling, and Harry's cheeks still feel like they've frozen in place, skin prickling like white noise playing across his face. “You thought,” Harry needles quietly.

When Liam does speak, it's to the doorframe, ready to turn tail like the conversation's already been lost. Like Harry's already been lost, or has always been, slipping away from Liam as mist slips through fingers. “I thought we'd both be on a train home. Together.”

“I've _friends_ coming over,” Harry supplies, schooling his features into something stony in the face of Liam's stare, “obviously. What?” Harry's goes hot all over from it, that penetrating look, like Liam wants to dig up all his roots and see if Harry'll topple over. It's easier pulling teeth than getting Liam to give him the time of day. But now that Harry has his attention, even for this singular, solitary moment, it weighs heavy in his chest. A sinkhole of hunger forming somewhere beneath his ribcage. A fervour. A _burning_.

Still far, though. Still out of reach.

“I just don't know,” Liam stops himself, the sinew of his forearms tense as they cross. And Harry only just realises, the flyer is still scrunched into the tight fist of Liam's hand. And Harry thinks of how Liam never steps into his room, and the perpetual red of his teeth-worried lips. Of hearts and heartbeats, and how they crumple so easily, stutter so often. “You always need to be the centre of attention. I don't get why.”

“That's not true,” Harry murmurs, the edge rising up into his throat and quivering dangerously through his voice. Harry wants to explain. He wants the words to spill out his mouth like water, cool and effusive and _clear_. He wants Liam to be sure, to know, to understand and fit. Harry doesn't want to match Liam, he wants to fit. Fill the cracks with something like...

“But it's not a lie,” Liam volleys back, clanging in the space between Harry's ears. “It's like you don't love yourself enough, so you have everyone else do it for you.”

“Your envy is palpable. Does Zayn get upset that you spend the majority of your time obsessing over me?” A flame licks at his tongue, every hurtful thing he could think to say, burning at the tip. Liam always gets it mostly wrong, and Harry can't point the finger at anyone but himself. Because all he does is write and never tell the truth.

“I sort of don't want anything to do with you.” Liam turns from him, disappears from the doorway like moving beyond a picture frame. If only Liam _were_ a painting. Then maybe he'd stay fucking still for once.

“Then fucking go home now, then,” Harry exhales, heat curling wetly into the folds of his pillow. Maybe there is no truth, he wants to say. Harry doesn't _lie_ , he's not _a liar_. It's just a story, half told, honest but unfinished. And a question hovering silently where an answer should be.

Half truths, whole truths, no truth. Liam still walks away, because that's the reality. The sun has sunk into the hazy west, nighttime bleeding into the sky on cloudy tendrils, and Liam leaves him there. Laying in the dark while shadows grow tall against the walls. Harry clings to his notebook, as if it anchors him to the world and to this life.

He doesn't write.

\- - -

One year, the warmth is snatched from England on a wave and a jet engine, following Liam and his family for a holiday in Cypress. For the most part Harry spends his break alone, slipping in and out of disused corridors, fingers trailing the wood panelled walls in search of some patch of memory. All of Liam's quiet parts, pressed into the grain, waiting to be discovered. The quiet glowers and the maybe smiles and the lingering between silence and something vital.

A spectre, his mother calls him one morning, when he startles her by wandering into the dinette on quiet foot. Haunting her home, forlorn and hobbyless, looking like the manifestation of consumption. Everyone else is still asleep, curled into their dreams while Harry has yet to reach his bed. He sits with her, watching her pour a cup of tea, hazy light catching the silvery rim of the china, looking odd and out of place in her hands. The motions are all there, of course. A gentle grip on the teapot and a lifted finger, a spoon that makes little noise while it stirs. Delicate and sweeping, affectations of a past long let go but difficult to shake off.

Sometimes he finds it difficult to reconcile his mother, the woman who has no problem smacking him upside the head when he steps out of line, to the girl who grew up here, in the lap of old world grandeur and even older money, surrounded by too many passageways whose doors only lead to more rooms. Harry would have gone insane. He _is_ going insane. It doesn't even occur to him that 'the help' isn't even up yet; that there's 'a help' to wake up before at all. He hates it here, profoundly.

Harry rests his chin over his folded arms, the corner of his notebook poking from beneath them and Anne looks at him like she knows, placing saucer and cup at his elbow without a word. It's obvious how Liam weighs on his mind, thoughts of him spilling from Harry's ears and hanging off his shoulders like so many cobwebs and dustmites, his absence forming a wooden knot in Harry's middle, so tight his mother probably feels it. 

She must. What with how quiet she's become this holiday, Harry sitting across from her in the glowing morning instead of Liam's mum. 

“Why don't you go see if Anthony is awake,” Anne suggests.

Harry would rather jump off the overly ornate, gabled roof than willingly put himself in the same room as his odious cousin. He'd probably fare better, honestly. “No. I don't think I will,” Harry says. It's enough that his grandparents decided to put them in adjoining rooms (much less the same wing), but it's as if they've brushed aside any evidence of Liam's presence by having his room made up for Anthony. Anthony, with his overbearing, suffocating, Etonian douchebaggery. 

“Would you like to go for a walk?” 

Harry most certainly would not. Not with how stiff with cold his limbs feel and how he can't manage to warm up no matter how many layers he's under. But something about his mother's eyes, tired and humourless, changes his mind. Makes him want to press his fingers into the lines around her mouth and pull a smile out of her.

“Yeah. Okay.”

There isn't much else to do aside from walk, and unsurprisingly, that gets old rather quickly. Instead, he writes, because it's the only thing he has to occupy himself. He hides away in the back corner of the obscenely large library, where the light seems hard-pressed to make a space for itself. It's a little dusty and doesn't see much use, the faded burgundy leather of an armchair Harry often finds himself folding into, hissing softly against the fabric of his trousers. 

He takes pen to paper, like maybe he can sketch out Liam in so many words. He can't, he knows. No one is ever so simple that they can be pressed into the pages of a journal. There's a lot of trying, nonetheless. And if he can't seem to pull it all together, can't turn the sort of phrases that would make Liam seem a complete person, then Harry is probably reading. He'll pluck a book from the dark, wooden shelves and read as far as the day can carry him. And if he's not reading, he's probably sleeping, eyes strained with staring at his own and others' words all day.

Christmas comes and goes, sprawling estate lit up with faerie lights and flurries of snow that glisten like diamonds by the moonlight. He watches his mother, who watches her mother, whose hands, spotted with age, clench and unclench as they all gather around the towering Christmas tree and exchange gifts. Her smile stretches tightly over her teeth—which mustn't feel comfortable—while she sits next to a husband she likely hasn't said six words to in the last six months. 

Nothing about this place, this house, is appealing without Liam and his family here, everything washed out and drab. The faded colour of wind-chilled cheeks and unblinking stares, no present suitable enough to brighten the mood or the sheer snobbery of stifling upper class reservation.

More than anything, Harry's restless, contemplating the boundaries of this house as if it were the edges of his mind. Thinking on all the things in Wolverhampton that can't be bought, wrapped, and shoved into his hands on the woefully mis-dated birthday of “Our Lord and Saviour”. 

They have an old house in a nice neighbourhood on a quiet street in the part of England people tend to fly straight over. They have a boy, and his dreadfully middle-class family living across the street. Harry has a friend who confuses him, and he goes to a school that doesn't require exorbitant tuition and a pedigree. He has normalacy. 

Not a cousin built like a brick house who calls him faggot while dangling Harry's journal above a lit fireplace like the vicious arsehole that he is. Harry doesn't have to kick someone in the bollocks for ruining his things and calling his friends poofs, nor does he have to be decked in the face or chased into the garden for simply defending his privacy. Only in this fucking house. Only his godawful grandfather.

Harry goes to his room New Year's day with a bloody nose and doesn't come out until they go home. 

That January, Liam comes home sun-kissed and grinning, babbling on and on about a boy named Zayn Malik while Harry breathes frigid air through his mouth like some sort of gawky knuckle-dragger. While he talks, Liam's eyebrows disappear into the honeyed curls of his fringe, colour stolen by the sun, and for once, untouched by a flat-iron. He looks out of place in the pale day, leaning against the red brick wall of his front yard, surrounded by snow.

If he notices Harry's face, he doesn't mention it. He's too polite to push.

Liam wears Malta on the bridge of his peeling nose, and the curve of his smile, and in Zayn Malik's name, spoken like the secrets of the world unveiled. _Amazing_ , Liam keeps saying. _So amazing_. To meet a boy who reads and writes and glows like the sun. Whose lips press hot and languid under swaying palm trees and burn the cool night in a fever rush. Liam tells him _Zayn_ and means _love_ without even realising.

He looks happy, which is far more than Harry can say for himself.

“So how was your holiday,” Liam asks, perhaps realising that Harry is only half listening. Though, who can blame him? Harry can barely listen to himself most days, it's a wonder anyone can even get a word in before his eyes go impossibly still and his brain runs off someplace without him. It's not Liam's fault at all, that Harry's thoughts tend to wander.

“What was the question,” asks Harry, eyes watery, blinking against the cold. Even that aches, pulling at the bruised and taut skin that could be considered the left side of his face.

“Your holiday,” Liam repeats. “How was it?”

“Fine.” It was shit. He'd gotten a black eye from his cousin who nearly broke his nose. “It was fine.”

“You don't sound sure.”

“I'm very sure,” Harry asserts. He pulls at the fraying wool of his beanie, hair falling into his vision as he stares at the tire-made valleys streaking through the snow all along their road.

“Your face says otherwise.”

“Well if my face says so,” he bites out. It's too cold to roll his eyes. It's too cold to do anything, except perhaps, crawl into a dry hole and stay there until the world thaws and everything begins making sense. There's a word for that, isn't there?

“Really. What happened?”

“I had an unfortunate meeting with a brick wall.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“You weren't supposed to,” Harry says, wanting nothing more than to trudge inside and find the nearest corner to hide his face. “It's none of your business.”

Whatever argument Liam has, dies at the tip of his tongue, mouth forming a thin line as understanding settles in the crease right between his eyebrows. “You mean your foul cousin, don't you?”

“Whatever.”

“It's not whatever,” Liam objects hotly, the faint flush of his cheeks going puce under his sunburn. “What did he do?”

“Nothing,” Harry sniffs. “He punched me. It's not a big deal.”

“It's not nothing.”

“It is,” he counters.

“Why,” Liam pushes, warm fingers wrapping gently around Harry's elbows. “Why did he punch you?”

“I like cock.”

“Har—I...what?”

This is how he likes Liam. Speechless and confused and confused by him, all the things Harry feels when they look at each other. And though his victories are small, he savours them as he savours anything sweet, because they also tend to be short-lived. “That's why he punched me,” Harry says amidst Liam's silence.

Between them the wind hums a low exhale as Liam draws in with a hand moving to Harry's cheek, hesitant, fingers angling carefully beneath his jaw. “Does it hurt still,” Liam asks quietly, almost like it might offend Harry's ears. He can feel the heat below his skin, curling under Liam's roaming thumb, feather-light over his cheek. It could almost be the air itself, if it wasn't marked by Liam's clever gentleness or his warm palm.

“Not really,” Harry hums like the wind hums, certain that's what stole his breath.

Liam chews the corner of his bottom lip, staring at him like a decision in progress. Harry stares back because it's the only thing he can do, frozen to this brick wall, and the snow covered pavement. To this moment, where flurries of snowflakes stick to Liam's eyelashes so that all he probably sees is Harry, in ice and white. And then he leans forward, lips grazing bruise and bone, while the only thing keeping Harry steady are the two hands, loose against his body.

“What was that for,” Harry asks, barely a whisper, hollowed out from the inside.

Liam shrugs like he truly doesn't know, his breath ghosting across Harry's skin. He's close enough to see all the cracks that don't exist. Where they should be, where Harry wants to carve them. Liam's only flaw is he doesn't have one.  
“I dunno. Just in case,” he murmurs into Harry's ear.

“I'm not seven,” Harry scowls.

“I know,” Liam pulls back, head cocked ever-so, squinting at Harry as though he's the one being weird. He moves in again, and this time pressing his mouth against Harry's parted lips, stealing everything in a second's stretch.

The only thing Harry can think, is 'how perfect'. Spinning through his mind over and over. Perfect Liam, and his perfect family, wrapped up in his perfect, middle-class life, and Harry. His perfect fool. Fumbling into a kiss that is anything _but_ perfect, too cold and chapped. Coursing with the taste of sea and sun and extraordinary, clever boys, all left behind. There is nothing extraordinary about Harry except his money, and not even that belongs to him. Not even virtue, or shame. Liam, with his mouth moving over Harry's, is something bitter.

Fucking Zayn Malik.

They break, when Harry shoves him. A lightning strike cutting between them, where there is no clap of rushing air but the furious beat of Harry's heart, crashing against his ribs. “What the hell,” Harry spits raspily, so angry with Liam, but even more with himself.

“Sorry,” Liam says, shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Sorry. I just. I thought it might make you feel better.”

“ _It didn't_.”

Of course it's only Liam being nice, being helpful. Pilfering bits of Harry like an all consuming fire, scorching the recesses of his spirit and leaving foul black marks. Claiming space inside his soul. Valleys, and cracks, and the Mediterranean Sea; Everything Liam's made it impossible to cross, or understand.

Harry shoves past him, because he may not _get_ Liam, but he can at least _cross_ a fucking street. He can retreat into the evening under a swaddle of down and Egyptian cotton and compunction. When he reaches the wrought-iron gate, the one that separates him from the rest of middle-class England, he stops. He turns to Liam, who is still standing there as still as a tombstone in winter, back facing him like a wall. Harry thinks the warmth left with him, that it decided to never come back.

“I'm gay,” Harry shouts. “Not desperate.”

Nobody ever knows about that day. It was Harry's first kiss. He tells no one.

\- - -

In Harry's relatively short time on this earth, he's learned that parties are rarely anything but a precursor to sex, the cost of which is taken in faded nights and bleary-eyed mornings. There is no pain like the self-inflicted, bathed in broad daylight next to a face you barely recognise.

This party is no different, really. Beneath the affectations of higher education, and half-cognisant chatter masquerading as independent thought, are the writhing desires of lusty youth, begging to be fucked. Harry drowns it out in countless fingers of scotch, all pointing him down a road of sorrow and drunken malaise. His head, cradled in the bend of Nick's lap, buzzes incessantly, with music and fire and the hollow prick of desertion.

He errs on the side of always-too-sober, stumbling through a teenage sort of mood, lost in a world of paper-thin witticism and false charm and poison ink seeping into his fingertips. Everything is sideways, and dimly lit, and utterly mystifying, with people milling about like the thoughts in his head. Ill-conceived and hard to grab onto, and all _words_. A swarm of words that swallow everything but the truth. And maybe that is Harry. Maybe Harry's a liar. Or maybe he's nothing at all but dissonance and a trick of the light. Nick's fingers running through his hair do nothing to alleviate such notions.

Is this what it's like to feel upset?

Above him, Nick prattles on in slow tumbling phrases, having little to contribute to the relative merits of breast augmentation, seeing as he neither has any nor is he particularly concerned with them, given his largely open and widely broadcast love of dick. Still, he gives it the old college try, and as usual, finds a way to swindle a conversation out of the fittest girl in the room.

Meanwhile, Harry is in the middle of a crisis the size and shape of one Liam Payne, and everyone is doing fuckall to assuage him. Not that he needs assuaging, of all things. Rather, it would be nice if he wasn't being ignored at the very party he threw.

“Stop it,” Nick flicks him by the earlobe,

“What?”

“The moaning,” Nick says, apparently fed up with Harry mewling hopelessly into his thigh. His displeased stare says as much. “People might get ideas.”

“People already have ideas,” Harry mumbles, balancing his empty glass on the end of Nick's bony knee, placing it like he'd place a full stop where it shouldn't be, nonetheless content with how it looks. It's a shame he can't apply that sort of logic to real life. “Liam has ideas. About me.”

“You're hopeless.”

“So what if I am?”

“So what if you are,” Nick says. “There's nothing _I_ can do about it.”

“You could be a friend.”

“Or I can pretend you're actually more than your good looks. That you're a fully functioning human being.”

Harry tries to settle into the noise; A crowd of people in his home, alcohol and grime and the grit of their souls drudging under foot, dirtying his floors. It's loud, and messy, and he's lost all ability to make sense of anything beyond the blood rushing beneath his skin. “Careful. You might hurt my feelings.”

“If you had any.”

“Uncalled for,” Harry protests, pushing himself upright so that Nick may feel the full effect of his glare, however lazy.

“But not unfounded.”

“Utterly and completely unfounded,” he says, voice rising above the din.

“Where _is_ Liam, I wonder,” Nick throws back. It's like a stone to the face, jagged truth scraping Harry's uneasy peace.

“I just realised I'm not drunk enough,” he announces gruffly, picking himself up shakily. “Not for this, or for you.”

“Don't strain yourself carrying that cross.”

Harry ignores him for once, cutting a swathe through his jampacked flat with relative ease. It's astonishing how many friends he seems to have when he opens his pockets and booze falls out, opens them wide enough for anyone to stick their hand in. He's _cool_ , almost effortlessly so, and he's not a fool to think it has little to do with the number of zeroes lining his bank balance. Or that he has that strange, intangible kind of beauty, like the phantom moon sharing a sky with the setting sun.

Rich and attractive and altogether unattainable. That's all the kids care about these days, besides fucking. And of course, since Harry happens to be all three at once, his friendship is somewhat of a commodity in this city. Makes him someone worth knowing, even though there's not a damn thing worth knowing about him more than the next sorry sod.

They part for him like a red-faced sea, none of whom he recognises beyond a casual courtyard nod or fleeting street greeting. He's forgotten why he even invited them all to begin with. Why he made Niall throw flyers around the city like the streets aren't covered with enough trash. Why he opened his door to this. Most of these people aren't anything to him but background noise.

Then there's Liam, who rings between his ears like gospel on a shoreline and a raging storm over the sea. And Harry, he can't be still. And Liam, he can't be found.

Inside the kitchen, where the counter becomes a corner, near the massive metal tub filled with ice and liquid courage, he finds Louis and Niall. It's much louder in here, there's less finesse; music struggling to break beyond the threshold. More serious conversations have taken root, trust-fund philosophers passing joints from hand to hand in a sluggish merry-go-round, potsmoke floating about Harry in ghostly tendrils.

“You look upset,” Louis observes serenely, somewhat preoccupied with keeping together a shoddily rolled spliff. The purse of Niall's lips give him away, impatient, staring at Louis' decidedly unclever fingers faffing about with the rizzla. But Louis is not to be rushed, for as he's oft proclaimed (completely sober, if anyone can believe) only he is allowed the luxury of impatience.

Niall exhales when Louis finally manages to fold the joint together, licking at the edge of the paper and slicking it down into something even the clumsiest pothead mightn't be ashamed of.

“I would have to be upset to look upset,” Harry says, reaching for the spliff just as Louis tucks it into the corner of his lips. So many corners, so many walls. Erected by the steely blue of Louis' eyes and the brick-heavy audacity captive behind his teeth. He's mostly a mystery. Only mostly.

“Do you know how annoying it is to have a conversation with you?” Louis leans back, slapping Harry's hand away like he would a fat fly.

“You're about to tell me, I bet.”

Louis is surprisingly quick-handed for a third year psychology student with no inclination toward anything requiring excess movement. Though, there was a year, a long time ago, where football may have been a thing. But that was before Harry, and before people became so transparent. Only errant whispers now that Louis exists in the space between rapacious focus and vague detachment, no more room for anything but the shifty peculiarities of the human condition.

“Give us a toke,” Harry asks. Niall is very much appalled.

“Roll your own, you shite,” Louis snaps, probably more offended that Harry even exists as a person, much less a person who is trying to hijack his joint. “Talking to you, is like talking to an ill-tempered pendulum. If I had a pound for every time you bitched—“

“You'd be as poor as dirt,” Harry answers.

“I will bite you,” warns Louis, who is not well known for making good on his promises, but is certain to leave no threat hanging without follow through.

It doesn't stop Harry from exposing his neck in a silent challenge, one foot away from throwing it all on the floor and going for a mad, messy tussle of limbs and words. Tonight, he's feeling reckless. Crazy for attention, even if it's the wrong kind. There's no one here to judge him. No disapproving frowns or pointed admonishments or quiet, dull-edged disappointment.

“You two,” Niall sighs. He slips between them, snatching the spliff for himself. “Fecking children, honestly.” They watch it light up between Niall's pinched fingers, crackling on a deep inhale as he goes slightly crossed-eyed staring down at it. Niall is all soft goofiness and bleached, downy hair, blowing smoke into Harry's face through a wide, awkward smile. Something about it makes him look so bright, and so young, and it wrestles a chuckle from Harry as both he and Louis wave smoke from their eyes.

After a few more tokes, and to Louis' utmost displeasure, he hands the spliff off to Harry, clearing his throat and reaching for his beer resting on the counter.

Everything about getting high seems appealing right now, and Harry doesn't hesitate to puff away to the soundtrack of Louis' disgruntled murmurs. And all the conversation around him, the buzz and wax of unfettered smacktalk, all the words people string together to twist around his heart like a garrote, float away on a cloud. There might be something beautiful about it, actually. Taking hit after hit, until what feels like an aching becomes little more than waves against a beach, like salt-air filling his lungs or sand shifting beneath his body.

It's a happy high. A warm high, as if he were sick and drowning with sun, cold chased away by the dizzying heat of sweet smoke burning his throat. Harry leans against Niall, passing the joint along while staring at Louis' moving mouth. A rapidfire legato of words uttered quietly between them while the noise around them only seems to grow more fierce. It takes him a moment to realise what exactly Louis' complaining about, Harry's brain sluggish, still circling around the bereft little hole some might describe as feelings. Not pain. Something less, but rooted deeper.

He recognises the shape of Nick's name on Louis' mouth and in his scowl. In the way his brow becomes tight and in the cross of his arms. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea inviting them both, but then, Harry didn't invite anyone. He just left the door unlocked hoping that the right people would walk in. According to Louis, however, Nick is in no way, shape, or form one of those people.

“Liam's not here.”

“Can we skip this segment of the Harry Styles Variety Show tonight?”

“I think he hates me,” Harry presses.

“Why don't you go write about it in your diary,” Louis suggests tiredly, whatever tact left in his body curling up behind some cold part of his heart.

And it's starting to go to his head, smoke and derision coursing like a burn against his skull, churning slow and deadly and making him say things. Making him weak. “I'm trying to have a conversation with you,” Harry mumbles with something akin to frustration creeping between the movement of his lips.

“I'm trying not to,” Louis shoots back, passing the joint along back to Niall and sipping at his neglected beer. “Anyway, you already know what I think. And you know how tedious I find repetition.”

“Yeah but you never say anything useful.”

“Then why do you even bother,” Louis' voice lifts righteously above the rabble, cutting clumsily through the deep bass of the music and low roar of conversation. Harry can feel the eyes turning toward them, one by one, as he and Louis face each other. He can already see the barbs beginning to twist along his tongue, ready to launch them into the deep end of an argument that Harry honestly has no energy to swim away from. And it's unfair, because he can't even get high at his own fucking party without slipping on eggshells and watching the entire place collapse around him.

“You're a shit, y'know,” Harry says, a chill making room between his words and turning them sharp. He's one of Harry's best friends, but a shit all the same. Louis is all pushes and pulls, feinting and striking circles around the rest of them with very little subtlety. Perhaps he might have found that thrilling, in some other life. Perhaps even alluring. Now, it only serves to prick at the nerves Harry forgets he even has, and is quick to sober him up. Except nothing is clear, the fog of weed and alcohol fast replaced by the haze of something darker, and meaner.

Fingers wrap around his elbow, bending into the crook of his arm like fleshy hooks pulling at him half-heartedly. “Walk me out,” Nick murmurs, tugging Harry away from his ungainly anger, stumbling, and he couldn't be more thankful. Nick sneers at Louis with contempt, barely contained, pushing Harry forward in silence while the two glare and wish misfortune on one another. The entire interplay of their relationship can be summed up as an overly drawn out pissing contest, in which Harry's attention is used to mark out their territory. And the borders keep shifting, and Harry can never keep up.

He doesn't pander, normally, but as the night has worn on, Harry finds he wants to look at Louis less and less. Something roils within him, at the hypocrisies piled in front of him that make up Louis' life.

They reach the front door without incident or interruption save for a few passing farewells and back pats, Nick's hand firm against Harry's shoulder as they move through the throng. It's no less loud in the foyer, music having moved from the strum and pluck against a drumbeat, to something more visceral and hypnotic that bounces off the walls and makes Harry feel like he's shaking. People linger about the hallway waiting for the loo, huddled up with each other like everywhere else in his flat, but with less purpose. Talking about everything, talking about nothing at all, while people shuffle past with their backs against the walls.

No, not quiet by any means. Somehow, though, Harry is able to think again.

Nick slips into his coat silently, staring at the scuff marks at the bottom of the door, the ones that Harry put there whenever he kicks it closed. The ones that Liam bitches about whenever he catches Harry doing it. There aren't many, but they're stark enough against the wood that they'd be hard to miss. A veritable history of Harry coming and going, full of words, yet unbothered by their weight. Maybe now, not unbothered. Maybe numb.

Harry leans against the frame, shoving his hands into his impossibly tight pockets. “Leaving so soon?”

Nick levels him with a hint of side-eye, toeing the border of accusation. “I sense something afoot,” he says. “And I'd rather not be privy.”

“And I was just beginning to like you again.”

“Easy now.” Nick buttons up his coat, spindly fingers dancing across the grey fabric expertly. “I'm not always looking for a row, contrary to what Louis might have you believe.”

“You two should really sort yourselves out.”

Nick takes his time wrapping his horrendously garish scarf around his neck, tossing the end so that it drapes over the back of his shoulder. He treats Harry to a steely, unwavering glare. “You _are not_ one who can talk,” Nick says flatly.

Harry's eyes are rolling before he can stop them. “Liam's not my ex-boyfriend. Our situations are nothing alike.”

Nick scoffs. “You don't have 'situations', Harry darling. You have stories, unfulfilled. Rotting away on the paper you've written them.”

“Piss off.”

There's a knock between them, and Harry almost mistakes it as an echo of the cacophony coming from his living room. But it's there, loud and sharp against the door, rattling obnoxiously in Harry's ear.

“Stop being such a knob.” Nick says, hand coming to rest on Harry's shoulder again, pressing him into the wall and forcing him at attention.

“That's hard, since I'm surrounded by them.”

“And stop picking fights with your friends,” Nick continues as if Harry hadn't even said anything. “And _stop_ putting Liam Payne atop a pedestal you only mean to kick over. Because when it eventually does topple, it's going to land right on top of you.”

Nick gathers the last of his belongings while Harry folds his arms across his chest, staring at the knots in his floorboards and considers just sitting down the rest of the night since they have been a better friend to him these last few weeks than his actual friends. He could fall asleep there and freeze and never have to worry about sorting the jumble of ideas in his head or the people who think they're all mad.

The knocking comes again, somehow more urgent this time, knuckles against wood fighting to be noticed.

“Cheer up, sausage,” Nick says, reaching for the door. “You're one lucky sod. All these people are here for no other reason but you.”

If anything, it only makes Harry feel worse. Because no one is really here _for_ him so much as they are to be seen near him. Why else would anyone bother to find the flat of someone they've hardly spoken to?

Nick pulls the door open just as another string of knocks begins, stopping just short of the threshold and giving whoever is on the other side a once over. “And what a lucky git you are,” Nick sighs, shaking his head. “Why do all the fit ones start showing up when I leave.”

“Tosser,” Harry huffs at Nick as he departs and none other than Zayn Malik walks through the door looking like fury and a storm and all at once beautiful, and everything that Harry despises.

\- - -

When Harry first steps into his new flat, greasy-faced and bone tired, he barely has the energy to drag his shit beyond the foyer. He leaves it there and takes a breath for himself, tugging at his hoodie until it comes up over his ears and leaves his hair in disarray. And when he moves further in, crossing the empty entryway that leads into the living room, he's met with the dark outline of narrow shoulders slumped forward, and even darker hair fraying around tan ears.

The closer Harry gets to this person leaning out the open window, he smells before he sees the smoke curling around his shoulders, daylight pouring in and fixing shadows upon the floor. _I know you_ , Harry thinks. _I know this_. Fear gathers up in Harry's throat, the worst of his dreams coming to light as Zayn Malik turns toward him, and suddenly Harry knows a hate unlike he has before, because Zayn's perfections are only more blinding in person. Zayn has the sort of beauty that people write about, that people sing songs for and carve into stone. Thin as a whip and all soft angles, dark, and elusive, bleeding of sun and summer and the things Harry will never know.

“You must be Harry,” Zayn speaks softly, taking one last pull of his cigarette before crushing it in the overflowing ashtray on the window's ledge. And at the same time, Liam's voice comes from another room down the hall. “Is that you, Haz,” Liam calls.

It's almost as if he's been struck dumb, it takes so long for him to answer, silence stretching long and tense. “Yeah,” he says, forcing sound out his mouth weakly, throat thick, straining. “Yeah, it's me.”

The first time they meet it's at opposite ends of a room filled with unpacked boxes, with smoke hanging between them like rivers running wild through the air. Liam happens upon them like that and Harry can't say shit to save himself. He hates Zayn on principle.

\- - -

“Who would have heard you, I wonder,” Harry asks, too sober still for a night this cold and this angry. Though in the back of his mind, Harry knows, he can swallow a sea in beer and weed and bad decisions, but it will never be enough. Some holes just can't be filled and some people don't find the things that make them whole. He chases it in words often enough to taste the dust of nearly there and knows the weight of it in his mouth. 

Zayn is the gate of nearly there, blocking Harry from even seeing the other side. It's in the way his eyebrow arches, and how secrets stay locked beneath a façade of apathy. An apathy focused solely on Harry. 

"I assume you're here for something," Harry says, picking nonchalantly at the elbow of his sleeve. 

“Is Liam here?” Zayn looks pained to even ask, a momentary twitch cracking the ever-present stone of his expression. He could launch a thousand ships with his face and sink them before they even reach open water. Harry wishes _he'd_ answered the door instead because nothing would have made him feel better than slamming it in Zayn's face. He counts his blessings, however, for he has all these ideas spinning frantically inside his head. Ones that work better in practice than on paper. 

"I thought you of all people would know where Liam is. Aren't you two attached at the arsecheek?"

Zayn looks properly annoyed now, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and avoiding Harry's unwavering stare. "We had an argument—“

“Oh, you too?”

“He ran off. I thought he might come back here.”

“Aside from this being his home, why would you think that?” Though it's on the verge of absurd to think that Harry and Liam and ' _home_ ' have anything to do with one another. It's all just space, occupied by a winter of confusion and misgivings. And Harry pushes too much, and Liam pushes back and the foundations wear away and become weaker over time.

“He's a masochist,” Zayn states, simple as. 

What does it say about Harry that he doesn't feel guilty at all? He looks at Zayn and sees something wholly unattainable, standing there with his slicked up hair and peacoat black as void, cutting a slim, cool form in the packed heat of Harry's flat. Like he belongs there, like he belongs anywhere, making room for himself with those ridiculously sharp cheekbones. 

“Well he hasn't,” Harry tells him. “And I don't suspect he will.”

In that moment, in the revelry and the noise, a realisation creeps upon Harry, surreptitious and cold enough to burn. Here in front of him is someone who knows Liam better than even himself. Knows him better and for longer than Harry's actually been around. Which is fucking insane and unfair because Harry got there first. Harry was there the most and he feels like he knows Liam the least, and it _burns him_ like envy. Could even be envy, if only he could put a name to it before. And it's so upsetting, so discombobulating, that the one thing Harry thought he knew everything about, is the thing he knows nothing. 

“You want a drink,” Harry offers, pushing himself from the wall and looping an arm through the bend of Zayn's. 

“I shouldn't really,” Zayn protests, attempting to disentangle himself from Harry's deceivingly firm hold. “I should go”

“Don't be silly. It's a party. You're meant to drink.”

“It's _your_ party.”

“That it is,” Harry agrees. He leads Zayn away from the foyer and into the mass of people that have turned his living room into a makeshift dancefloor. Harry's pretty sure the neighbours won't have anything kind to say to him at the postbox in the morning, but it's nothing a plate of cupcakes and a charming, crooked smile won't repair. If they're not already milling about his flat, that is, joined in on the festivities. Either way, ASBOs never stick when you've got the money and the team of highly paid solicitors to throw at them. 

“Sit,” Harry says once he shoos a snogging couple away from the sofa, too engrossed in the slide of each other's mouths to notice they're leaning against a boy passed out beside them. Zayn glances at the boy warily, seemingly fighting the urge to scoot as far away from him as possible. He then turns his disbelief onto Harry when Harry tells him, “Don't go anywhere.”

“Wouldn't dream of it,” Zayn grumbles almost too low to hear above the music.

Once in the kitchen, again, Harry finds that Louis and Niall haven't moved, still holding it down near the drinks tub. Only now they're pressed against one another and wearing red-rimmed eyes and are full to the brim with mirth. Louis is whispering in Niall's ear, both of them breaking into a giggle and a fit as Harry bends own to dig for a beer, hand stinging as it hits the ice. 

“What would El think,” Harry admonishes lightly, watching them both laugh at him openly. 

“What _would_ El think,” Louis postures, having quickly forgotten how close he and Harry were to fighting not fifteen minutes before. “I don't see her about, though, so it doesn't really matter.”

“Why is that?”

“She's a grown woman whom isn't attached to my arsecheek,” Louis says, setting Niall off into another round of breathless, raspy laughs. “She has her own friends, ones that aren't as woefully dysfunctional as mine”

“Oi,” Niall punches Louis with the hand not around his shoulder. “I am perfectly functional I am.”

“Well there's no accounting or subjectivity, obviously.” Even rolling his eyes, Louis seems fond.

Harry snorts, smiling into his jumper while he pulls two Stellas out of the ice, shaking them off carefully as he stands. He hasn't the foggiest what Zayn likes, but he figures slightly over-priced Belgian is as good as any. 

“What's up with you,” Louis questions suddenly, Niall having fallen silent beside him. 

“I'm not sure what you mean?”

His two friends, more clever by themselves and even more dangerous together, share a look between them, where an entire conversation passes with the furrow of a brow and a pursing of the lips. It only ever means Harry is in trouble. He pops the two bottles open and prepares to make a quick exit. 

“You've been stroppy all night,” continues Louis. “A right moody fuck you've been. And now all of a sudden you seem...pleased.” Niall nods in agreement, flush of his cheeks stark next to his blond hair. “I don't like it when you're pleased. It doesn't spell anything good for the rest of us.”

“Please,” Harry scoffs, backing away, thoughts turning to the boy waiting for him on the couch. 

“You're about to do something stupid, aren't you?”

“That depends on your definition of stupid, I think.”

Louis snorts into his drink. “Well considering I use you as a measuring stick...”

Harry flashes him two fingers on his way out the kitchen, determined to put as much distance between them lest Louis feel the need to pry or Niall stumbles onto Harry's bad ideas as he is wont to do. 

If he's honest, Harry's a little surprised to find Zayn still there when he returns. Though, he's moved to the very end of the couch now, phone in hand and fingers flying across the touch keyboard, screen lighting up his face and washing it out blue. Harry falls next to him, hands one of the Stellas over, taking a gulp from his own.

“Bored so soon?”

“I really shouldn't be here,” Zayn says, making to get up and leave. And Harry should let him. He should stifle the roiling in his chest with something less traitorous and let Zayn walk out the door and back to whatever his life consists of beyond the person they share. Only, Harry's hand shoots out to still him, clasping Zayn's bicep, hoping to hell he doesn't seem as desperate as he feels. Because Zayn here beside him, he is someone Liam loves, someone Liam knows, who smells like Liam for pity's sake. Or they smell like each other. Of rain and earth and rising smoke and heat. And without Liam here, Harry will settle for the next best thing. If anything, at least Zayn is something to look at. 

“Don't,” Harry says, refusing to plead but very nearly sounding like it anyway. 

Zayn, he's like marble. Living, breathing, _sighing_ stone, a lingering sadness settling over his stiff shoulders. The longer Harry stares at him the sharper he becomes, fine lines and angles curving and sweeping into something remarkable. Sitting next to him, Harry feels like patchwork, slowly disassembling, fraying at the edges. Until Zayn finally relaxes into the the couch not with a word, but with a nod, gaze averted. Like he's fascinated by the grinding and undulating currently taking place on the makeshift dancefloor in the middle of Harry's living room. 

Several moments pass between the sliver of space between them, a liquid heat bleeding from Zayn's shoulder as Harry presses up against him. Staring at the condensation on his bottle, picking at the label with his nail, words begin to form in Harry's mouth, awkward and graceless. “Can I ask you something?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry can see Zayn glancing at him warily, curiosity and consternation passing over each other to fix upon his face. “Depends,” Zayn mumbles without feeling, clearly not intending to indulge Harry in the least. “How likely am I to lamp you afterward?”

“What is it that Liam sees in you,” Harry sort of blurts out. No, definitely blurts out, with as much tact as Louis on a good day. His face suddenly goes warm at the cheeks, from the alcohol and the weed, surely.

“So, very likely,” snorts Zayn. 

“Sorry,” Harry apologises, with enough decency to at least attempt to look contrite. “Not like that. Not in a mean way.”

Zayn's remains as still and unperturbed as ever. “In what way am I meant to take it?”

“In a...not mean way?” 

“You're the wordsmith of our generation.” Zayn shakes his head, bringing his bottle to his lips and knocking back a few gulps of beer, throat shifting beneath his skin as he swallows. And it makes Harry swallow, Zayn turning to him again and fixing him with a flat expression. 

“So, wordsmith,” Zayn pushes. “Say what you mean.”

Harry huffs out a breath, hot air the most temporary of reliefs leaving his cold nose. “What I mean to say,” Harry begins, unsure of what is about to come out his mouth. He knows what he wants to do but lacks the words to follow the path there. “What I mean to say is that, you're really good friends with Liam.”

“Oh?”

Harry's brow creases down the middle, but he continues as if Zayn made nary a peep. “And I guess I just kinda wanted to know you better. And figure out why I'm not that way, with him.”

Zayn seems to produce a pack of Marlboros from the thin, cool air, box edges worn and crinkled from days spent in the dark of back pockets. He flicks it open with one swift motion and slides a cigarette between his lips, tongue peeking out the corner of his mouth as he sucks in while lighting the end. One deep inhale and Zayn isn't looking at Harry anymore, rather, has found something interesting in the ceiling to focus on. “You're turning out to be a lot thicker than Liam claims,” Zayn chuckles. 

A sick shiver runs up Harry's spine at the mere thought of the two of them, Liam and Zayn, having a laugh at his expense. An entire worldview turning on its side at the prospect that Liam could ever show such malice. “Liam calls me thick,” Harry deadpans.

“That is not what I said,” Zayn is quick to correct him. He pulls at his cigarette again, rolling the butt between his thumb and forefinger, reaching over Harry to flick ash in one of the many makeshift ashtrays strewn strategically around the flat. 

“In what way am I meant to take it,” Harry echoes obnoxiously. 

Zayn seems as unimpressed now as he was walking through the front door not ten minutes before, if not moreso. “Is this your clumsy way of trying to be my friend?”

“I...don't know. Is it working?”

“No.”

Never has Harry met anyone so impassive. Out of all the muscles it takes to frown, Zayn uses virtually none of them. It doesn't stop him feeling like the disdain is rolling off Zayn in waves, however. 

“Is this degenerate bothering you?” Harry feels fingers slide from behind to wrap around his vision, room no less dim than when they weren't there, hot breath at his neck and the dank smell of potsmoke invading and permeating his senses. And it's all over Louis' hands, clammy against Harry's skin, with something dark and tart lingering below it. As if Louis got ahold of Niall in some unseen corner of Harry's flat, had pressed hurriedly, had sought out crevices too narrow to traverse inexpertly. 

Though when Louis let's Harry see again, Niall is nowhere to be found, his presence too ripe to have been gone from Louis' side for too long. Harry glowers at him as he proceeds to hang off the back of the sofa by his armpits, chin half resting on Harry's shoulder. Zayn looks on in bemusement, toking at his cigarette calmly.

“Why so serious,” Louis pushing at the corner of Harry's mouth with his forefinger. 

“Where is Niall,” Harry asks, not at all out of curiosity. More out of something meaner, a quiet sort of accusation. 

“Waiting for the loo,” Louis replies as if nothing is amiss. And for all intents, nothing is. “Seriously, mate, could you have invited any more people?”

“Pardon, I wasn't aware that you lived here.”

“Noticing things was never your strong suit,” Louis moves from the corner of Harry's lip to prodding him in the forehead, more intent on where Harry's nose meets his brow than any one person should be. 

“It's my strongest suit,” Harry disagrees.

“Not fumbling through conversations,” Zayn pipes in, drawing Louis' attention away from pestering Harry and trying to cause him break outs. “Shame,” Zayn says. “If that really is your strongest suit.”

“I like you,” Louis says damn near instantly. “Who are you? Why don't we know each other?”

“Zayn,” the boy offers his hand, somewhat reluctantly, like it's a gesture not often practised. 

“Liam's friend,” Harry supplies with a an air of neutrality. However Louis, despite the relatively little time they've known each other, reads him like an open book, with pictures and large letters for those of poor eyesight. 

“Liam's _friend_ ,” Louis repeats. “Zayn.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.”

“Right.”

“You know me,” Zayn tries asking, only it comes out disbelieving. The most emotion he's shown the entire time he's been here. 

Without a doubt, Louis and subtlety have very little to do with one another. They're casual acquaintances at best, and at worst Louis outright defies it with every step and inhalation he takes on their little patch of planet, takes it to its grave before the dawn of every new day. Louis looks at Harry without subtlety, because he has slain it in its bed and forces the rest of them to deal with the consequences. 

“Not at all,” Louis answers Zayn. 

And what can Harry do but shrug, rolling his head from side to side until he is leaning his temple against the side of Louis' warm, hard head. “Not at all,” Harry smiles winningly. 

All around them the party rages, like rushing water and beating drums, blood running hot between fervid lips and palms on hips. It's like standing amidst a flame, Harry, a stone at the bottom of a firepit, transformed and illuminated. And through the red, Zayn is awash in noise, fingers at his lips, still sucking at a dying cigarette. 

“Don't do it,” Louis murmurs in Harry's ear. “I see you Harry Styles.”

Harry laughs, head swimming and room slanting to and fro. “But do you _know_ me?”

“Does anyone,” Zayn pipes in, voice thick with smoke.

Indeed.

\- - -

“What're you doing?” 

Liam sounds exasperated, which is by no means atypical where Harry is concerned. 

Seventeen is a horrible year, marred by a late arrival growth spurt, spots, cracking voices, and hair sprouting up all over. Harry feels awkward in his own body, not quite accustomed to the swing of his long limbs and the kind of momentum they create; certain that it is, perhaps, something he will never get used to. Stumbling through life guileless and gangly. He quickly runs a hand through his messy hair, sweeping it so that it runs with the wind and out of his face, stretching his arms out afterward. 

“What does it look like,” Harry asks, staring intently at his feet as they manoeuvre one in front of the other, willing himself upright, even if he is a bit unsteady.

“It looks like you're trying to break your neck,” Liam says, walking alongside Harry, watching him balance precariously atop the brick wall running all the way down their road.

He can't say it's a warm night, but Harry is drunk enough where it makes little difference, to his body nor to his mood. He moves shakily, one foot in front of the other, shoes scraping against the brick every time he steps forward. Liam looks like he's biting into a lemon, squinting up at Harry with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat, flinching whenever Harry makes a particularly wobbly footfall. 

“Please don't fall,” Liam finally says, stopping just in front of him so that he'd have to step over Liam's shoulder to continue. He has a feeling Liam thinks this is more than just drunken Saturday night stupidity, something lurking in the dumb, lazy grin that Harry's giving him. That Harry simply can't act an idiot for once, having come off an entire evening of bad decisions and reckless make out sessions with strangers at teenage house parties. He's not sure Liam's wrong. 

“You'll catch me, yeah,” asks Harry. “If I fall?”

Liam's hand drops on the top of his shoe, slipping over the leather so that his fingers come to hook around Harry's ankle, all the while staring intently up at him, “If you want me to.” Liam's dark eyes bore into him like a hot knife twisting into the butter of his gut. “I will, if you want me to.”

Harry should sit, legs suddenly turned to jelly and heart hammering in his chest, as if thunder got caught between his ribs and echoes up his spine and into his skull. “I don't,” Harry shakes his head so that, maybe, all his thoughts spill from his ears. “I want you to come up here with me.” 

It takes almost no effort to pull Liam atop the wall with him, clasping each other's hands while Liam finds his own balance, his feet lined up toe to heel. He wobbles a bit when Harry grasps onto his shoulders, inching forward so that their toes might touch. “What's the point of this,” Liam huffs, facing Harry with more grace than any drunk teenager has ever had or deserves. Then again, Liam's never been the type to knock them back, so perhaps, in Harry's fuzzy, tilting vision, Liam's not as drunk as he seems. “Now we'll both just fall. There'll be no one to pick us up.”

“Exactly, Liam.” 

“You're mental, sometimes,” Liam says. And maybe he's right about that too. “What will you do without me?”

He's spent the last three months thinking about it, silently contemplating from the moment Liam opened the big, thick envelope from London School of Economics. The truth is, Harry honestly doesn't know. It's a hushed, ambivalent sort of fear, without form or reason or logic. London is far and a year is a long time for someone who routinely overindulges in melancholy.

“Break my neck I suppose.”

“God, don't even joke.” 

“Who says I'm joking,” Harry grins. It doesn't last long, however, with the serious look Liam is giving him, too earnest and genuinely worried. Harry moves in, bumping their foreheads together until all he can feel is the warmth, swirling in that spot, Liam's brow relaxing under his. Harry speaks softly, scared that he might give more of himself away than he already has. “M'gonna miss you.”

“No you won't.”

“Shut up, Liam,” Harry huffs. 

“You'll get along fine without me. You have plenty of other friends.”

“Sure. But they're not _you_. I'm going to miss you in particular, tosspot. I'm trying to be sentimental here.”

Liam laughs, the echo of it bouncing around Harry's head as Liam vibrates against him, they're foreheads still touching. “Okay,” Liam gives in. “I'll miss you too.”

\- - -

“You're going to make your head pop.”

“Will not,” says Harry.

“You're going to make yourself sick.”

“ _Will not_ ”

How can someone make themselves sick when they already are, he wants to ask. Harry's head hangs off the couch as if detached from his neck, legs thrown over the back and arms stretched across Louis and Zayn's knees. From upside down the world looks different, of course it does. Like gravity has given up and people have free reign to live their life in every wrong way possible. With the floor becoming the ceiling and everyone falling upward, clunking steps against a solid, hollow sky, over and over. 

But what is up, really? Is it Harry's head over his heels, or words forming underneath his fingertips, or maybe Liam awake in the morning, kneeling before Harry with a hand on his shoulder 'Wake up,' he says, 'Get your arse up, lazy.' It could just be the blood pooling in his head, but it almost feels like floating. Does direction exist at all? Harry only knows one: toward Liam. Constantly running into him, so that they might smash apart and reform into one person. Though, perhaps, he should reconsider such amorphous definitions. Perhaps he should reconsider such strategies.

"Hold up, I think I might be ill," Harry groans, Louis barely avoiding his legs as they fall into his lap, Niall sniggering at them as if nothing is amiss. He only showed up a few minutes ago, Harry catching sight of his knees as Niall had crossed them all to sit on the armrest, pressing himself, hip to thigh against Louis' shoulder. 

"I _told_ you," Louis says.

Louis tells him a lot of things, but it's not in Harry's nature to listen. He's too lost in the way the world knits together around him and all the meanings hidden in the threads. If fate exists, if it conspires against him, if he's a gnarl in the fabric of his own life. Harry uses words to make sense of everything but only ever confuses himself, tangling his own meanings up.

The rough way the denim of Zayn's trousers scratches against his cheek brings Harry back to all the noise, to Louis' hand clutching his ankle, to Niall grinning in the swirl of lights and people. Harry frowns, tossing himself over until he's a bend in the space between Zayn and Louis.

"Please don't be sick in my lap," Zayn says with one hand on Harry's sternum and another tucked beneath his shoulder, looking ready to throw him to the grimy floor at a moment's notice.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Harry assures him, none to keen on the idea of sullying Zayn's pristine little façade in front of two hundred or so relative strangers, especially if it means he has to embarrass himself to do so. 

The song turns over, something fast and angry and full of bass deep enough to burrow into the pit of Harry's chest. And he notices the tic in Zayn's cheek, almost imperceptible if he weren't already so still. Even in the dim light Harry can see him tense up, the evenness of his face cracking along the edges, mouth pulled taut into a thin line. Every beat seems to unsettle Zayn, and Harry suspects staring with a morose kind of curiosity doesn't do anything but make it worse. 

But he is curious. 

It's not his only fault (Harry is self aware enough to know that, at least) but it is the one that propels him into the worst decisions he could possibly make at the worst times. It's an artform, really, and unlike games, it's something he's very good at. 

"I wanna dance," Harry says, sitting up to two disbelieving stares and Niall snorting into his plastic cup. He wants to shake the dizziness off and the confusion away until everything is brand new and he's not himself. 

"With who mate," asks Niall.

"Somebody who loves me," Harry grins at him, the madness of the evening rooting into the base of his skull and making it throb. 

"Lame!" Louis shakes his head in disgust. "Let's leave Ms Houston out of this. Dancing with yourself should be no problem."

"Why are you so spiteful and jealous," Harry sighs, a mite more dramatic than he needs to be. He figures, though, he should probably talk to Louis in a way he understands; with waving arms and a gravitas in his voice reserved for the theatre. Not the West End, however. Something far more ametuer. The Hackney Empire maybe. Or the New Vic. 

"I'm only trying to keep you real," Louis smiles back with no sincerity whatsoever. 

"I noticed."

Something flies over Harry's head, Zayn and Louis tossing expressions back and forth wordlessly, forcing Harry into a monkey in the middle level of volleying between them trying to figure out just what they're saying without saying. They've only just met and they have clearer understanding of each other than Harry can ever hope to achieve with...anyone really. 

"C'mon then," Niall stands, knocking back his drink in one swift gulp.

"Yes," Louis agrees. "Go on. I want to pick Mr Malik's brain here for a sec without you two numpties distracting him."

The scratching beneath his skin grows in a rush, prickling as Niall grabs him by the wrist, pulling him into the hot crush of bodies writhing in the middle of his home. Zayn and Louis disappear in the press of heat, harry and Niall engulfed and surrounded in no time. He keeps catching glimpses of them, Louis scooting closer to Zayn with a look of someone on a mission, secret and dangerous and ready to dissect Zayn with sly conversation and slight of hand. Harry almost changes his mind, almost slips from Niall's grasp to slide between Louis and his plans to wreck Harry's plans. And maybe Harry really should reexamine his choices if most of his friendships are a game to be played and won. 

"Harry," Niall says into his ear, the only anchor he has in this storm of night and people and alcohol fuelled grinding. "Harry," he says again, arm draping over Harry's shoulders, sleeve scratching at Harry's neck. 

"What am I doing," Harry says, watching Louis and Zayn form a shell of quiet words, fluttering behind the swing of limbs like strobes and shutters, light in a crowded box.

"Your best," Niall answers, pulling him close. 

Like so many realisations, it creeps to him slowly, unbalancing in its utter newness, clammy in the way it grabs hold of him. He sees Louis, speaking low but animated, drawing smiles from Zayn so effortlessly it's hard to believe there wasn't one there before, Louis' hand on his thigh, Zayn unfurling under his attention. Niall beside him smells like sweet smoke and sweet kisses shared between hot lips, tense against Harry's side like he is constantly at loss. 

"Niall," Harry looks to him, sees his eyes are still red-rimmed from something more than smoked out laughter, can't believe he didn't notice before. "He—"

"Has a girlfriend," Niall mumbles.

"Has a girlfriend," Harry repeats lamely. Though it's not even close to what Harry wanted to say, not even in the same neighbourhood, or town, or country. Louis is complication, and the only reason Harry knows this, knows where Louis stays, is because Harry stays there too. 

But he and Niall. They're both so alike sometimes, easy going and unobtrusive, letting things slip from their shoulders like water on naked flesh. Or maybe it only appears that way, because most days Harry feels like he's drowning, and all this time there was someone sinking beneath the surface right next to him. 

"C'mon," Niall urges. "You wanted to dance."

Yes, he did. So they do.

He lets Niall lead him to the very centre of the mess of people, bumping hips as they move, Harry letting his body go loose and letting the music wash over him. And maybe in the heat, the two of them gleaming at each other like school children, jumping about with the thumping bass and knocking themselves into a frenzy, maybe Harry can forget, just for a moment, the cold and the need, and the slapping fruitlessly at facades too thick to even shake.

The beat takes him to some hot, far away place, where Liam's face doesn't haunt him at every corner; where Harry doesn't hide around one, ready to pounce at the slightest little revelation and steal it for himself. He dances, feet shuffling under him, knocking into Niall's as they both twist around one another, all elbows and knees and hips, swaying to and fro. Song after song, Harry keeps going, Niall moving close as the beats get heavier and people get handsy, and Harry cares less. 

It's probably the seventh or so song in, that Harry's feet begin to ache and his legs begin to burn, reminding him how out of shape and potsoaked he is. The room doesn't spin, but he's floating again, Niall's grinning red face wobbling in the dark. Harry holds him by the shoulders that they might steady, his chest tight and hot.

"Drink," Niall asks him.

Harry shakes his head, hair falling all about his face and sticking to his forehead. 

"Sure?"

He nods. "You can go get one if you want."

"Yeah, I think I will."

"Give Louis a slap for me on the way there," Harry tells him. 

When he goes, chuckling, twining through dancing people, Harry falls into the rhythm once more. 

The party shows no signs of slowing, people streaming in and out of his living room on wisps of smoke and too many drinks, some of them greeting Harry with the kind of jubilation saved for someone far more important, and some walking right by him as if he weren't there. As if the flat is theirs, and Harry exists as his words, swirling and unwritten and unseen in the dark. He prefers it that way, he thinks, dancing in the dark.

It's awhile before he tires himself out, spinning himself out until his shirt is sticking to his back, hoodie tied off at his waist and loping about his thighs as he moves. He can hardly believe it, but he's so hot, face damp and back damp and everything damp is a stitch beginning to worm itself into his side. It becomes bad enough that Harry decides to sit the next song out, even as the guitar licks and heavy drums start to kick in and some old thing he used to sing in his room by himself crawls through the speakers. 

He snakes through the mash of bodies and comes upon the sofa once again, finding Louis alone, with his phone out and his fingers tapping away at the screen. It's something Harry's unaccustomed to seeing, honestly, having grown used to Louis being attached to one other person at least, if it weren't Harry, that is. 

"Where's Zayn," Harry asks, sweat slick and and flustered, skin thrumming over his flesh and bones. "And Niall?"

Louis squints up at him, probably confused that anyone dare talk to him before he get the first word in. "Oh," he says over the music. "You."

"Yes, Louis. Me. Party host. Flat owner. Sometimes friend. Person you've seen all night." There's hardly any reason for them to be like this, endlessly bickering, constantly trying to outwit the other. If wit at all mattered, Harry would far outstrip Louis anytime, he's convinced. All those years of scribing little phrenic and thoughtful fantasies in notebooks have to count for something. Louis' keen eye for well worn insecurity couldn't possibly keep up. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing is _wrong_ ," Louis tells him, sounding more uncertain than he would probably like. 

Harry catches a glimpse of his mobile, tipping in his direction as Louis' hands come to rest in his lap and he frowns, Eleanor's name bright across the top of the screen and a long text conversation stretching under it. The words are too small to read, of course, but what is evident is that there is a lot of them. "Zayn? And Niall," Harry questions, ignoring the way Louis' shoulders stiffen and he turns his phone over atop his leg. 

"I dunno," Louis says, head falling back onto the cushions. It's almost like he's given up, some invisible battle conceded to the evening that it may slip into the night and never come up again. "Zayn wanted somewhere quiet and Niall....I don't know."

"You alright?"

"Yes, of course," Louis snaps. "Stop asking me."

Harry rolls his eyes. Out of all of them, Louis talks about himself the least. It's a little unconventional considering just how much he talks to begin with. None of them are an open book, by any means, but Louis is a veritable lockbox to the rest of their poorly hidden secrets diary. It should be frightening how much Louis knows about the rest of them yet still manages to keep his cards clutched and folded to his chest, but Harry almost never notices, too busy waxing lyrical of his miseries to Louis' always there ears. It's likely something they learn in Intro to Psych, second half of the year, once they've mastered 30 Second Visual Evaluations and Making Potential Patients Uncomfortable With Your Knowing Eyes and Mhmming In The Key Of Relaxation.

And Harry very obviously doesn't know a single thing about psychology. 

"You wanna sit here by yourself and wallow," Harry asks.

"That would be bloody lovely, thank you," Louis responds sardonically, though he doesn't look anything but sincere. 

"Okay then," Harry shrugs, hand trailing along the couch as he moves around it, "Have fun with that." He pats at Louis' shoulder, startled when his wrist is caught in a vice, and Louis pulls him so that he's bent double and nearly tumbling over him. 

"Stop fucking around with him," Louis warns.

"I'm not sure who you mean."

Louis sneers, discomforted by how far Harry is willing to go to remain obtuse. "Please," he snorts, just as the flash on his phone blinks, and it shakes twice on his leg, calling for attention. 

"I think you've got a message," Harry says, slipping away from him. "Tell Eleanor I said hullo."

It's strange slinking about his own flat, especially when there's a hundred odd people watching him do it. Their eyes follow him as he moves through them, his shoulders drawn in as he makes his way to his room, hoping Niall is hiding out under his covers rather than having left Louis in the dust. After all, commiseration is only as fulfilling when there is more than one person to share in it. Getting down the corridor is like pushing himself through a straw, everyone jampacked and going all sorts of directions defied by such a small space. 

Getting to his room is slow going, smiling quietly until people are culled from their chatting to notice him standing there, apologising while they step out of his way and he repeats it all over again, little micro interactions piling atop one another until he's reached the end of the hall, grabbing for the knob of his room door. He never does turn it though, eyes drawn to the dark sliver rending a crack at the edge of Liam's own door. An entire minute passes, Harry stood there, stock still, choices rifling through his mind, stumbling all over themselves to be heard and urge Harry to make one. 

In the end, it's the light flashing against the wall that decides for him, not so much illuminating Liam's room as licking at Harry's curiosity. He lets go of the doorknob and crosses the noisy corridor, easier here where everyone steers clear of, too afraid to peek into the private parts of one Harry Styles and the notoriously taciturn roommate who's mostl known by name rather than face. 

No one here would be able to pick Liam out of a line-up, but no one would be so ungracious as to intrude upon his personal space, chiefly because Harry is present, even if only partially, in body if not in spirit. 

Harry pushes the door open, Liam's dark room revealing itself to him as well as Zayn's narrow back facing him, his body making a long, thin dent in the bed. He has his mobile pressed to his ear, speaking low into the mouth piece, harsh words more deafening spoken hushed and secretive, quiet as a knife slipping between ribs. 

"This is stupid," Zayn says. "You're being stupid."

Who's on the other end, Harry hasn't any idea. But he has a suspicion, and his stomach clenches and folds inside him, when he thinks about it. Thinks about how _his_ calls will forever lead to voicemail and his texts will go unanswered.

"You're _being_ stupid, not you _are_ stupid," Zayn seethes. "God the two of you are so alike it's painful."

Something sharp runs up Harry's back, like a thrill or a fire. He crosses his arms over his chest like he might contain it, leaning against the doorframe so that his knees won't buckle under him. Zayn still doesn't notice him there, even despite the hallway light reaching Liam's far wall and casting Harry's shadow there. 

"Well. I'm here," Zayn says finally, the evenness of his tone betrayed by the annoyance scratching the end of his words. Here is probably the last place he wants to be. "I won't wait up."

He hangs up, holding the phone out in front of him, flicking his thumb across the screen. Zayn breathes out unsteadily, knocking his mobile against his forehead as he grumbles and throws himself onto his back, eyes squeezed shut. 

"The noise bothering you?"

Zayn startles, head snapping to the side to see Harry standing there in the doorway, the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. Harry would like to think he was a lot more subtle than a truck, however. If anything, he's a bicycle. Wobbly and unsafe and very easily thrown off course, and if he has to weave through traffic and chaos and a propensity to err then so be it. 

“Yes," Zayn says curtly. 

Harry steps inside, choking on the smell of Liam, all clean clothes and clean floors and sweet cinnamon and expensive cologne, almost oppressive as he closes the door. There's a reason he doesn't come inside here so often, aside from being Liam's room. It fills him with dread and joy, all at once, how one little corner of London, in the vast world in a vaster cosmos, can make him yearn so much. 

"What is it," Zayn asks, reaching over to turn on the small lamp on the sidetable. His jacket is folded over Liam's desk chair and he's wearing nothing but a thin white t-shirt with some unknown band on the front, and it could be plastic. He could wear a literal plastic bag and it would still drape over his shoulders like it was made to fit, clinging to him like second nature, everything about Zayn so cool and effortless. It upsets Harry, to be confronted with everything everyone else thinks he is but is nowhere close to achieving, can't even bring himself to try and capture. 

Harry plays the part well enough, he supposes. But where Harry may look designed and well thought-out from the ground up, Zayn actually is. And it's evident, when standing them next to each other, who is the imitation and who is the real deal. 

He moves to the mirror propped above the bureau, examining himself in the crowded frame, pictures stuck into the edges distracting Harry from rubbing at his pallid skin. "I get the feeling you don't like me," Harry says, eyes tracing each photo in consternation.

On one side, a photo of Liam and Zayn, arms thrown over each other's shoulders, squinting into the sun as it kisses their skin, salt water lapping at their feet. On the other, Liam and Zayn, flushed and sweaty, pushed up against one another as people dance all around them, eyes closed to the flash, Liam blowing a raspberry into Zayn's cheek. And above that, Liam and Ruth and Nicola, wearing matching Santa's hats, sitting on the old gaudy sofa in the drawing room at Stokesay, their hands wrapped around mugs of hot cocoa, cheesing for the camera. Then one of Liam holding up his A-level results, smiling so wide, standing next to his misty-eyed mum in their living room, all the way back in Wolverhampton. 

And shoved up in the corner by itself almost like an afterthought, faded and crinkled and with frayed edges, is a photo of Harry. He's fifteen, with bad skin and a fading black eye, and he's not even looking into the camera. He's leaning against Liam's front gate, notebook in hand and hair all wind-wild. 

“What gave you that impression?”

"Hm?" Harry's eyes are drawn to Zayn's reflection as he edges toward the end of the bed, feet coming to rest on the floor.

"That I don't like you," Zayn says. 

Harry sees his own lips purse, turning around to face Zayn, flaws and all. 

"Call it intuition."

If Harry's not mistaken, he sees a twitch at the corner of Zayn's mouth, pulling up into the smallest of smiles, or smirks, or whatever they would call distant, cold amusement. "You're not far off," Zayn nods, pressing his hands into the edge of the bed, Harry watching it dip and rise between hand and thighs, his knees knocking together as he moves.

Harry sees a chance in their space, moving forward as they spread, his own knees hitting the floor with quiet thuds as he sinks between Zayn's, resting his elbows atop his legs. "Well, I like you, Zayn," Harry tells him, gazing up through his fringe, watching Zayn's eyes darken with something wholly unwholesome and mean. Harry feels as if he's parting the Black Sea, laying a hand on Zayn's chest and clutching at his shirt. 

He bites at bottom lip, arms encircling Zayn's slim form, pushing into him until he can feel Zayn's sternum under his mouth, thin t-shirt dampening in the space between. Harry feels the knobs along his spine, the soft, exposed skin where his shirt is rides up at the back, the fabric of his boxers snug against his hips, dips the tips of his fingers under them. 

"What are you doing," Zayn hisses, hands falling onto Harry's shoulders, gripping him hard by the collarbones. 

"Trying to show you how much I like you," Harry says, as is if it's the most obvious thing in the world. Only it's not just that. It's also Liam, stuck beneath Zayn's flesh, hidden away from Harry by years forged in friendship and trust. He searches for it, wants, _needs_ anything that may bring him closer to knowing Liam, rubbing his face right in Zayn's belly, noses at the button of his tight jeans.

Zayn interrupts him, grabs at Harry and holds him still, staring him straight in the eye. There's a fire burning there, and it's like Liam is right there, blazing angrily before him. "Do you have _any_ idea how people work," Zayn questions fiercely, grip tightening

Harry blanches. "No," he says, frowning. "Why do you think I write so much?" 

Who, besides Louis, can truly understand how people work? They're too complex, too erratic, to driven by desire of which even Harry is not immune. He has made it his mission to unravel the intricacies of _one_ person, and has spent ten years discovering over and over just how impossible that is, no closer to revealing the one thing about Liam that makes him himself. 

People are so nebulous and otherworldly yet still so base and predictable, Harry has trouble discerning who is what at any given moment. Can only pick it weak spots for reactions. 

"Do you even _want_ this," Zayn asks, incredulous, but gently so, voice soft as a winter breeze, and just as cold.

"I want—" In all honesty, Harry doesn't even know, has never even asked himself. He's lived so long with desire and thought existing apart, on two separate planes dividing the black and blue water of his soul, conscious lost somewhere in there, drowning. "Why does it matter?"

"These things tend to," Zayn winces, knuckles white against Harry's shoulders.

"What I want," Harry speaks slowly, head no less foggy despite his goal shining there through the haze, latching onto Zayn's wrists and pulling them off with little protest. He tugs at the back of his own shirt, pulling it over his head, feeling the tie of his hoodie loosen as he tosses his shirt aside. "Is your dick in my mouth."

There is grace in his disdain, Zayn's face scrunching up in distaste, at himself or at Harry, neither of them is sure. What is sure is that he lets Harry fumble at his jeans and unbutton them with unsteady fingers. "Is the peerage to be so uncouth?" 

"You're confusing landed gentry with nobility," Harry smirks, pressing down upon the hot, hard length of Zayn's cock through his pants with the heel of his palm, relishing in his moan, thinking about how Liam's hand might have been here. Zayn's hips push forward to meet his hand as he falls back on his elbows, gazing down at Harry through half-lidded eyes, pupils dark as all hell. Harry fingers at the waistband of his boxers, draping himself over Zayn's lap with a sigh. 

"I don't have a title," Harry says, tugging at Zayn's underwear, his dick rising, caught in Harry's ministrations, the pull of it making Zayn squirm beneath his hands. It slaps back against his stomach, once Harry has got Zayn's trousers around his thighs, loud as a gunshot even in the muffled quiet of Liam's room. Harry licks at the underside of Zayn's cock, trailing a wet stripe up his dark shaft from balls to head. "I'm just very fucking rich."

"You're just very fucked up," Zayn manages through gritted teeth. 

Harry can't manage a smile around Zayn's cock, but he agrees, very much so, sucking at Zayn with a whine wriggling at the back of his throat. He takes his time, letting the feel of it sit across his tongue, stiff and hard as he moves over it, hand circling the base and thumb pressing into the underside. And Zayn's dick twitches into the roof of his mouth, Harry rutting into the bedframe, his own erection trapped in the tight confines of his jeans, throbbing against the fabric. 

And if he closes his eyes, he can almost taste Liam, imagines his plush lips stretching pink around Zayn and his big hands drawing at his bollocks. Imagines himself in Zayn's place, getting himself wet in the hot confines of Liam's mouth, Harry spread and exposed and completely at his mercy. Zayn's moans get louder the harder he sucks, the waves of his climax pushing closer and closer with every twist and every pull and swallow. 

He pulls off then, Zayn's body going hot and tight under his hands, Harry running the tight circle of his fist up and down Zayn's cock, watching Zayn fall back into the bed, back arching as he thrusts into Harry's fist, the slick heat rubbing fiery between their skin. And he comes across Harry's open mouth, catching his brow and tongue and red, raw lips, yelping as Harry strokes him through it, breaths heaving back and forth between them. 

It takes Harry a second to catch his breath, laying his cheek upon Zayn's knee, closing his eyes and licking at his lips. The taste of Zayn is bitter and salty and sits in Harry's belly like on open sore. And there is nothing of Liam there. There is nothing for Harry to find in this but regret, settling in him far quicker than he could have imagined. He sits back on his haunches, shifting away from the bed until he can see Zayn entirely, loose-limbed and fucked out over Liam's bed.

Harry is so fucking stupid. Liam isn't there. Of course he isn't.

Though if the Fates were in the business of giving Harry what he wants, they have a very cruel way of going about it. The door swings open making little noise save for letting in the din from the party still raging on the other side. A shaft of light whips through the darkness, growing wider until it spreads over both Zayn and Harry and brightens the room enough that everything there to be seen can be. 

Liam stands in the doorway, jaw as tight as his fingers on the knob. 

"Liam," Harry greets him with a smile. He hears Zayn fumbling with his jeans, cursing under his breath while he attempts to tuck himself in and button up before the entire corridor can get a view of him. Or maybe just for the sake of Liam, looking for all the world like he were at the edge of a cliff about to jump off. Harry wipes at the jizz drying cold on his face, dripping off his jaw and onto his bare chest. 

"Get out," Liam says shakily, trembling as a bow trembles, pulled and quivering and ready to release an arrow right into Harry's gut. 

They both hesitate, Zayn and Harry, daring not to look at each other, not with Liam burning a spot in the floor with his eyes, ready to turn his gaze on either of them, certain that they might be set alight. Harry's elbows dig into the hard floor as he sits up properly, Zayn following suit. 

"Harry," says Liam, a shiver running up Harry's spine at how fast Liam's voice goes still. "Get. Out." 

Harry has never seen Liam erupt before, hasn't seen him this upset, hasn't seen him clench his fists that his knuckles lose all colour. Hasn't seen him so angry that he's silent, sense giving over to rage and all words lost thereof. It's beautiful, in the way that disaster is beautiful, a great storm of fiery, thunderous clouds swooping in over him out from the horizon. 

" _Fucking get out_! Get out, Harry," Liam yells when Harry does nothing to move. "Go the hell away!"

Harry stumbles to his feet, Liam throwing the door wide open to chase him out into the hall, grabbing Harry by the bicep and dragging him out when Harry doesn't move quick enough. He slams the door right in Harry's face, all eyes turned toward them, taking in the spectacle. He's shirtless, semen is cooling and drying on his face, flaking at the edges, and Liam is opening the door once more just to throw Harry's balled up shirt right at his head, slamming the door so hard it shakes the frame and Harry's heart. 

Shit. 

"What's happened," Niall asks, peaking his head out of Harry's room, eyes red and sleepy.

"Nothing, mate," Harry chokes out, throat raw and aching. 

Liam's shouting can be heard even above the music, and above the curious mutters, and the furious throb in Harry's chest. Everything is loud, and it's like he's suffocating in the noise and the stares. He wipes at his face roughly with his balled up shirt, Niall appearing next to him with a look of concern. 

"You alright, man?"

"I'm fine," Harry tells him, staring at the knots in the door, the grain of the dark wood swirling before him and making his vision go blurry. Doomed from the start, Louis had warned him, and still Harry didn't listen, swallowing the bitter taste of shame and come. "I need a cigarette though."

"I'm sure Lou has one stashed away somewhere," Niall says gently, easing Harry away from the door and into the living room. He helps Harry into his jumper along the way, pulling the sleeves on and hanging it off Harry's shoulders. "It ain't that hot in'ere," he grins. 

When they happen upon Louis, now reclined on the couch with another joint in hand and his phone nowhere to be found, he takes one look at Harry and shakes his head. "What did I tell you," he says, smoke curling from his mouth and fuzzing up his eyes. Even so, he sits up, patting the empty space beside him big enough for he and Niall to fit. 

"Go away, Louis," Harry grumbles, falling into place with Niall on one side and Louis on the other. 

None of them talk, all their words exhausted for the evening, Harry hunching over with a joint pushed between his lips by Louis and lit by Niall. And he pulls at it, let's the smoke fill his lungs until all the misery is gone and his chest feels lighter. It takes long though, for him to get that earlier feeling back, like he's loose and without purpose, ready to throw himself in mortal peril for a lark. He doesn't consider where that kind of thinking got him, pretends like he hasn't moved from this spot the entire night. 

And when he hears the yelling, hear's the banging of wood on wall and burning caustic remarks hitting their marks, hears Liam telling Zayn to fuck off, Harry pretends he doesn't. Doesn't even flinch when both Niall and Louis turn their faces to the ruckus, swinging back around to Harry when Liam slams the front door and storms back into his room. He doesn't hear any of it. He just knocks back some of Louis' half-finished beer and draws in lungfuls of marijuana enough to make him lightheaded just for breathing. 

\- - -

It takes them hours, when they first move in. 

They've spent the entire afternoon lugging Harry's things up five flights of stairs, and the rest of the evening unpacking all their things, working room by room until all that's left are empty boxes and everything in its rightful place. When all is said and done, when the furniture is all pushed into their spots and the final genuine Richter is hung up (and when Zayn mumbles one last time about Harry just carting priceless works of art across the country as casually as one would some grotty, old bandposter) they find themselves on the roof, popping open a bottle of Bollinger.

"Oi, oi!" Liam and Zayn shout in unison, Harry sitting back in one of the many chaise longue's set up for the tenants. He doesn't suspect they see much use, though, with how dusty they leave his hands, grit getting into the denim of their trousers. He's handed a plastic cup of champagne, Liam beaming down at him like there isn't enough face to express his cheek. 

"Did we not _just_ unpack all of the glassware," Harry asks warily, sniffing at his drink like it's container might somehow have changed it's contents. 

"Yes, Liam, we mustn't have your little Harr-Rah drinking from plastic cups," Zayn needles. "What will the neighbours think? What will _Mummy_ think?"

"Piss off," Harry sticks him two fingers, Liam sidestepping so that he can block their line of sight to each other. 

"Don't be so posh," Liam admonishes. "This ain't Stokesay."

Harry recoils, the mere reminder of his grandparents house causing him something like physical pain, old phantom injuries welling up at the mention of that hellaciously incurious place. A chill runs down his spine, as if his grandparents can sense his mutinous thoughts from a hundred-fifty odd miles away. Harry looks down into his cup, the normally golden liquid bubbling and white in the dim light of the crescent moon. 

"Atta boy," Liam says once Harry sips at it. He laughs, watching Harry going for gold and gulping it back instead. "We'll make a lad of you yet."

"Please," Harry swallows, champagne sparkling and bubbling all the way down his throat and into his belly. "You act like you didn't grow up in the same neighbourhood as me. I mean, whose house was yours attached to, Liam? I don't recall."

It wasn't attached to any house, free standing and detached like every other house in on their road. Just because Harry happened to live in the biggest, with the tallest walls and the most ornate gate, doesn't mean Liam suffered any more than Harry did. So maybe his grandparents don't live in a veritable country estate, and maybe he doesn't have a trust fund worth millions sitting, waiting for him to finish his degree, this little corner of London that money helped carve out, the top floor flat with more space than two people should be able to fill in a neighbourhood reserved for overly-affluent single families and celebrities trying to keep their homelife lowkey, it wasn't only Harry's mother's. Sure, Anne had fronted money unthinkingly, and unflinchingly, reaching into pockets deep enough to drown in for a downpayment. But Liam's mum? She hadn't questioned a thing, had only given the contracts a cursory glance, probably just to make note of how much money would go missing every month for the benefit of her son. 

"We grew up in Wolverhampton, my friend," Liam chuckles. "If that in't an excuse for bad behaviour, then I don't know what is."

Harry rolls his eyes once more, stealing the bottle from Liam and pouring himself another cupful of champagne. Liam sits next to him as he looks out at Centre Point, standing tall above the rest of them like a glittering pillar. Zayn has kicked his feet up onto the ledges, laying back into the ground so as to look up at the stars. 

"So," Liam starts, throwing an arm over Harry's shoulders. "Your first night in the city."

"I've been to London before Liam," Harry says. "All by myself even."

"Yeah, but," he responds, cocked his head back as if preparing a thought. "Not with me. You're here with me, now, in London, where fancy little yuppy dreams are made."

"That I am," Harry agrees. He might have been sooner had he the bollocks to face the fact that Liam might exist in a world outside of him, here. Has school, and Zayn, and people who don't know he sang My Love to Harry in Year Nine. Harry had spent the last year moping about his house, writing weepy short stories about lost innocence, seeing outside only for school and for the occasional drink with some people from his French class, just for a pause in thinking about how far away Liam is and how many pictures of he and Zayn show up on Facebook and how much fun he seemed to be having. 

All without Harry there. He doesn't know if 'jealous' is the word, but anyone else would be certain it's what Harry's feeling. 

"It'll be great, yeah?"

"Sure," Harry nods along. "I guess."

\- - -

The morning is raw, damp heat of a hundred people having permeated every slat and groove in the wood of floor and wall, from crown moulding to baseboard, down to every adorned fixture. Slowly the sun peaks above the shadowy grey of the city, melting over brick and stone and metal, every crack and crevice, to pour into Harry's window and right onto his sleeping face. 

It feels hot—which objectively, Harry knows is a lie—and his head is full of muck and ash as he groans unhappily. Who let the light in? Surely not Harry, who spent the rest of his night smoking in his bed with the window cracked open to the sound of a city dying overnight and resurrecting come morning. Not he, who hung out beyond the sill to stare at the backs of flats and the dirty, unkempt courtyard below, dropping the ends of his cigarettes into a pot of sand from five stories above, to the dismay of the girl in the flat across. Surely not him, surely not _Harry_. Never would anyone hate themselves enough to forget to close the curtains in their very east facing windows after an entire evening of drinking their weight in alcohol. 

It is far more likely, Harry make believes, someone sneaked into his room and opened them in an attempt to punish him. Does that mean Harry doesn't deserve to be woken so wretchedly? No. He thinks that he might deserve every single thing that has happened to him in his life. 

Body aching, Harry pulls himself from the clammy twist of his sheets, feet touching floor one by one to the soundtrack of creaking bones and muscles slower than rotten honey fussing under his skin. The noise of his body going in revolt. If he's not mistaken, something has gone and died and begun to putrefy inside his mouth and his first real thought of the day is ' _Fucksake_ '.

It takes a lifetime to reach the toilet, each step showing Harry brand new avenues of pain, little jolts running up his spine to prod viciously at his head. The kind of pain that makes him shiver like the heat is creeping through him to pool in his head and leave ice in its wake. Like winter, like death. 

Coming out of his room, Harry ignores Liam's closed door, moving past it unsteadily, hand scraping quietly against the wall as he makes his way down the short corridor. 

By the time he gets to the loo, he's shaking; can barely stand to take a piss, so ends up sitting with his pants around his ankles, elbows digging into his knees, and face planted firmly in his palms. Harry's unsure if he falls asleep like that, but the last thing he remembers is thinking how strange it is to hear yourself pissing through the haze of half-sleep and a pounding head. The next thing he knows is what it feels like to have a heart attack when your elbows slip between your knees and you're so rudely returned to the land of the living. Being startled awake on the toilet is not a feeling Harry had ever thought he'd discover, but he supposes there's something to be gained through experience; that is, an experience more than any real wisdom. 

Don't fall asleep on the toilet. What a life lesson to pass on to his children and his children's children. He has an inkling that it is and will always represent the sum of all his knowledge.

Harry might be sick. Also, he's never drinking again. 

Eventually, by what could only be some divine intervention, Harry gathers the strength to stand and brush his teeth. He rifles through the medicine drawer for a paracetamol (or two, or three) and downs them with a few sips straight from the tap.

The mirror isn't very kind this morning, showing him a vision of himself not very far off from a corpse. Under the harsh, stark light he looks drawn from tip to toe, hair a hazard of mattes and flat curls, bags hanging heavy and dark beneath his eyes, and skin pallid, almost blending in with the white wall behind him. Honestly, corpse might be a bit of an understatement. Shit, it might even be a compliment compared to all the other foul things he probably looks like. 

The only thing that looks worse than Harry right now, is the flat. It looks like a resting disaster. 

Harry slips on two red solo cups on his way to the kitchen and avoids countless more as he approaches the cupboard. All around him, bottles clutter every surface, and the smell of stale smoke and spilled beer hangs thick in the air, the last vestiges of a once packed flat and a cold reminder of how alone he is. 

It takes him an age to decide he doesn't want anything to drink, and if he even looks at food he'll throw up. He puts on the kettle, despite this, just to listen to the air rush around and the water bubble against its thin plastic walls, to feel it warm up under his hands until his palms are burning. Just a little heat to bide his frigid bones over. And when he does end up making himself a cup of tea anyway, he relishes the way the heat of it blooms under his sternum, trailing hot down to his belly. For a minute he can feel alive, like all his parts thaw out. 

The lacquered wood of the floor is misleading, he realises, when he moves from the tiles of the kitchen to the living room. His toes curl up on themselves when he reaches the couch, throwing himself onto it amidst the disarray. He pulls a cushion up against his chest as if it might do any good versus the steadily dropping temperature. He recognises now, that maybe getting out of bed wasn't the best idea, amongst a slew of not very good ideas he's been having. 

Harry lays there, though, unable to move, staring at his tea mug he'd sat on the coffee table piled high with more bottles yet, and an overflowing ashtray, and an empty crisp bowl. Steam coils above it, barely visible. Out of the ashtray, sticks a Marlboro Light, half-smoked, lipstick mark pink and bright on the butt. He reaches for it, stretching his long limbs so that he's balanced at the edge of the couch. Before he can reach it, he snatches his hand back as if burned, almost falling over with how hard he flinches. 

There, right behind the ashtray, sits a set of keys. They lay there innocuously, troubling nothing and no one except Harry, his stomach turned to stone and weighing his entire torso down. He leans back into the sofa, arm thrown over his face, which is the exact thing he should have done instead of get out of bed. Anything, he could have done _anything_ but get out of bed. It's too late to go back now, and he feels as if he might burst.

Harry doesn't think Liam will be coming back, ever. 

\- - -

“I was sure I'd find you here,” Louis says in lieu of a greeting, chair screeching out in the quiet library. Louis falls into the seat across from Harry, oblivious to the art of the preamble. He hasn't learned in the half a year they've known each other and as far as Harry can gather, he never will. 

Harry doesn't give him more than a cursory glance, _Hours of Idleness_ cracked open next to his laptop, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “Finding me where I do the majority of my studying. Revolutionary,” Harry says flatly. 

“Term ended three days ago, Harry. Don't act like this is where you need to be.”

“I have like three essays to get through, Louis,” he looks up from his work, irritation creeping through the front of his mouth and nearly spilling into his words. “Some of us are still only in their first year and have more than just a dissertation to contend with.”

Luckily there isn't many people about, given the late hour and the fact that no one likes to spend their Mondays at the library. Not especially when there's holiday to be had. 

It's only been a day since he woke up to a dirty, empty flat. Honestly, he could still be hanging, but more than anything Harry feels drawn out. He spent the whole of Sunday on the couch, getting lost in shitty reality TV and contemplating where he might find wood to burn in the fireplace and whether or not he should just use every single notebook and journal he's ever owned. He woke up this morning drooling into his arms, head fuzzy, with chaos still all around. 

The entire morning he cleans, scrubs his flat from top to bottom, whining at having to leave his windows open to air out the smell of smoke and regret and bad decisions. Thankfully not anyone's sick. He even cleans the scuff marks on the bottom of the front door, getting dizzy from wood polish and too much exertion. He avoids the keys sitting on the coffee table like he avoids thinking about Liam: with determination. And when all is said and done, every glass back in its rightful place and every empty bottle thrown into the big bin down his short block, they still remain. And no matter how spotless the floors may be, or how much the flat reeks of Cillitbang, Harry can't seem to move them away. 

“You're fooling no one,” Louis tells him.

Harry snorts. Only himself, and that's enough. 

“Where do I _need_ to be,” Harry demands. 

“You know exactly where you need to be,” Louis says like flame has engulfed his words. “On a train back home.”

“That train has long since left.”

“I'm not sure if I'd be more angry if you mean literally or metaphorically.”

“Do you mind being angry somewhere else,” asks Harry, though the way he says it makes it clear it's not a request. “I have no interest in hearing from the Chorus right now.”

Louis scoffs right back at him, getting up from his seat, fed up with Harry for the evening. “Please. Sophocles would weep at how poorly written your tragedy is. Pick up your bollocks, mate.”

“Noted,” Harry says, returning to throwing together something that might resemble a coherent exposition of Gothic architecture in Romantic literature. 

“See you after holidays,” says Louis on his way out. “And apologise to him, you silly git.”

\- - -

There's an exhibit at the White Cube that Harry wants to see, but never does. It's hard to imagine trekking all the way out to Shoreditch in such agonising cold. The first time he tries he ends up at the pub around the corner, nursing a cider and bemoaning the state of his coursework and ignoring the way his mobile screams at him every so often. How it'll chirp with texts and bell for missed calls, shaking his pocket apart in a bid for attention. He puts it on silent and continues not to wallow, hoping his mum doesn't come down to London herself to kill him.

The second time he tries, Nick calls just as he's stepping out the flat door, wrapped in more layers than a Wong Kar Wai film, and then some. Nick comes over and they watch Chungking Express because Harry wants to cry but can't, and Nick loves hearing The Cranberries and Dennis Brown in the same movie. They don't go anywhere, of course, because Nick is reaching the point where he can't leave his house without someone recognising him, and there's zero reason to endure holiday crowds for a walkabout. 

The third time, Harry doesn't even get up from bed. He hears the patter of rain on his windows and point blank refuses to put up with Mother Nature for a room full of overlypriced mixed media presentations that are intentionally bullshit. Harry throws the covers over his head and stays there until his breaths become too shallow from the moist, thin air. He still doesn't get up, though. Just wraps himself up to the neck with the duvet and moans everytime the hot air of his nose blows across his lips, doing nothing but moving cool air. 

On his desk, his laptop sits, unused. And his notebooks on the floor remain there, just as neglected. There is nothing left for him to say. 

\- - -

"I'm fine," Harry sighs as he mother nags at him down the phone. 

" _No phonecall. No text. No word from you or Liam. He just shows up with bags in tow and you_ missing."

Harry falls into his bed, bouncing as his back hit the mattress. "I think I'd notice if I was _missing_ , Mum."

" _Harry Styles,_ " his mum warns.

He really did pick a bad time to fuck up, honestly. The one year everyone decides it's best to stay home for Christmas as opposed to trekking all the way to Stokesay Court at his grandparents' behest. From what Harry can gather, they've gone on holiday to somewhere warm, where none of their relatives can find, and therefore, bother them. Though he does wonder how often his grandmother must stay her hand from grabbing the nearest sharp object and sticking his grandfather in the throat. 

"Okay, okay," Harry concedes. "I'm sorry. I just, had a lot of stuff to get done here. Coursework stuff, and other things. But mostly coursework."

"You worry me, you know," Anne says. "I worry about you."

"I'm fine," Harry lies for the third time that day. By now, he's rather used to telling them. 

\- - -

Christmas Eve finds him at Nick's, cocooned in blankets and sharing mulled wine by the fireplace. A fireplace covered in soot rather than dust. Between them they've already gone through three bottles of champagne and an entire roast dinner, and now Harry might just burst. 

Nick has got his laptop balanced on his knee, glass in one hand as he types clumsily with the other. Ella Fitzgerald spins a song in the clutter of his mind, old Christmas standards running smooth along her voice. Nick, bless his cottons, has never been into Christmas as he is Christmas music. So when Harry shows up, bundled up, as if it's the next Ice Age, it's to Nick blasting Last Christmas wearing nothing but a t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. At first Harry wonders what kind of Viking blood is running through Nick's twiggy little veins, that is, until he steps inside and sees the fireplace roaring and smells turkey in the oven. 

Now, Harry is pretending that everything about being self-exiled from home for the holiday is normal. That he didn't leave his phone back at his flat on purpose. Or that Nick's best idea of Christmas is an Absolutely Fabulous marathon and alcohol. Not to say there is no merit in getting shitfaced to Edina Monsoon prattling on about the peculiarities of a drug fuelled existence and faking convictions; though, perhaps, it fits the occasion a little too well. 

“So am I Patsy, or Eddy,” Harry asks over both Nick's blaring laptop and the disorder taking place on the television. 

“You're the Gran, dear,” Nick says distractedly. 

“Am not. I'm clearly Patsy,” Harry takes a gulp of his nearly finished wine in preparation for another. 

“If you're so sure, why'd you ask?”

“It's a game, Nick.”

“And you really love playing those, don't you?”

Harry fidgets where he's sitting, shifting his weight from one bumcheek to the other, gripping his glass but then putting it down next to him when his fingers turn white. Even here he feels out of place, Nick's homey flat filled with no priceless shit to ruin, but instead, all the books you could ever ask for, strewn about the room, some half finished, parted in the middle and left open like an interrupted thought. 

"I've fucked up. Severely," Harry announces, cheeks warm. 

"You have, have you? How astute of you. To notice, that is."

He shuts off the telly with a grumble, tossing the remote somewhere onto Nick's couch. The floor looks comfortable enough to fall asleep on, and indeed, Harry relaxes his entire body across it, staring at Nick's wiggling toes as he clacks away on his laptop, no doubt building some setlist or organising some weird contest for the radio in the morning. 

“Why do I always fuck up?”

Nick laughs as if the answer isn't already obvious. The way he responds makes it seem so, anyway. "You're young," he says simply, taking two sips of mulled wine and going back to his work. 

"How is that supposed to be any use to me," Harry complains. 

"You're going to make mistakes," Nick looks at him seriously, Ella hovering between them like a nightingale, soothing Harry to sleep. Nick continues, "Sometimes very big ones. Ones that you can't take back."

"What is the point of youth, then, if your mistakes can't be forgiven?"

"God, Harry," Nick laughs. "To learn, of course."

The fire crackles at his back, heat curling around him like a blanket. Nick resumes typing, falling silent as Harry falls asleep, Nick's words spinning lazily through his mind. 

\- - -

It gets colder by the hour, Harry thinks, coat zipped up all the way to his chin. Above him, Regent Street is glistening with faerie lights, dancing and swaying in the wind like twinkling little stars free to frolic for the evening. The last time he felt this frozen, this winter bitten and breeze beaten, was the Christmas his mum bought him a journal.

He was only ten at the time, and gobby as all shite, talking up a storm for the sake of it, unconcerned with whose business he might inadvertently spill in the daily retellings of his life. He'd spent enough time listening to his mum groan about him telling their friends about Gemma's first period, and how she ruined her favourite jeans in front of all her friends. Or about how Mr Walsh next door accidentally locked himself out of his house wearing pants and pants alone. Or even how he once spun around so fast, looking at the clouds above swirling white and blue and grey, until he got sick all over his teacher's shoes. 

She pulls him out into the garden that year, frost crawling over them as they sit on the small bench in their backyard, Harry ten years old and unable to shut up, and gives him a leatherbound notebook with a pen tucked in the strap. He'd already gotten everything he wanted that year, but life has a way of showing you what you need.

She tells him that if he ever feels the need to tell a story, to write it down instead. That he can write whatever his heart desires, just as long as he doesn't share it during dinner parties with guests who have Lord or Lady in front of their name. 

He remembers, as he walks home, Oxford Street packed and alive with people, plodding forward, wrapped in coats and scarves and Christmas joy. 

Harry did as he was told. He writes about anything, he writes about everything. But mostly, he writes about Liam. He never stops.

\- - -

The clacking of his keyboard is, at best, hypnotic, rhythm pushing Harry further and further into a frenzy each time his fingers press upon a key. He notices nothing beyond the heater burning at his back and the chill twisting its way through unseen cracks. Not even how the day passes, how the light fills his flat and gradually recedes into dusk the longer his word document becomes. The only thing that pulls at him from the haze is his bladder and a vague, nameless sort of hunger not unlike yearning. He hardly eats, mostly because he forgets to. 

Harry writes, and writes, and writes some more, until he feels like there's cotton beneath his eyelids and an ache in his hands from cold and too much rushing blood. Only then, he'll go to sleep, trudging to his room and falling face first into bed and into his dreams before his head even hits the pillow. 

He writes until the sky sounds of fire and guns, New Year's passing with him hurrying to the roof to see bright colours shooting high in the distance, arching and curling through the night and bursting like tiny novas. And the scent of smoke fills the air and Harry's lungs and reminds him of beginnings. 

Still, after that, he continues writing, watching in detached interest as his missed calls grow and his inbox piles higher with unanswered texts. The only person he replies to is Gemma, more for his own sake then hers, knowing full well she has no qualms driving all the way from Birmingham just to give him a whack over his head. 

_I'm fine_ he texts her. 

_STOP BEING A TOSSER_ she responds. 

It turns out she doesn't need to come down, because Liam calls him over and over, and Liam's waiting downstairs, and Liam greets him with a tackle, like nothing ever happened. And maybe he leaves Harry's insides all twisted up and exposed, but he's here and Harry doesn't care that Liam hardly looks at him. He's just glad Liam came back at all. 

“I don't think anything, Harry. Not about you.”

And Harry definitely deserves it. 

\- - -

“I'm sorry.”

Even then, as teenagers, Liam says it so often it'd already lost all meaning. 

“Gemma said—well, she said it was your first kiss.”

“Gemma should keep her mouth shut.”

“It's not about Gemma,” Liam had said, stepping into Harry's room cautiously, and sitting by him on the bed. “I didn't mean to...Your first kiss should be with someone you like.”

“Are we not friends?”

“No, like, someone you fancy, innit.”

And there. Isn't that an idea?

Harry never learned to apologise because Liam always did first, even when he didn't need to.

\- - -

Liam doesn't apologise this time because it's Harry's turn and he doesn't know how. Even if he did, even if words came to Harry like they came to him in writing, like breathing or blinking or springing forth from the black, Liam would probably rather go on pretending he doesn't exist than listen to Harry fumble out an excuse he doesn't have. What is there to say, really, when you're so thoroughly and completely in the wrong? It doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, Harry can't bring himself to say _anything_ anyway. 

If Harry thought there was an air of chill before, it's even more evident now. They barely share the same room, much less speak. It's been nearly two weeks, and besides their first little tête-à-tête on Liam's return, they haven't said two words to one another. He'll grunt in Harry's direction, maybe, something resembling a 'morning' or 'night' (with a 'good' very obviously absent from the front of both because why on earth would Harry deserve one?). And they pass each other like ships, the waves of their presence felt in sideways glances and deliberate evasion. 

Nights are worst. Liam locks himself in his room with his textbooks and his dinner, blasting music loud enough that everything outside mightn't exist at all, Harry included. It leaves Harry on edge, unable to think clearly with N*E*R*D rumbling through the flat in an angry wave. 

One night, when no words come and his notebook remains blank, and his essays remain half done, it pisses Harry off enough that he bangs roughly on Liam's door until the music suddenly cuts off and the door swings open.

For someone who is just nearly as tall as him and makes a point of taking up the least space possibly, Liam really looks like he could throttle Harry at that very moment. It catches him off guard, and everything that Harry had to say suddenly dies at the tip of his tongue. Liam doesn't say anything, just crosses his arms and leans against the doorway, the lack of patience clear in the slow, insistent way he blinks. _Well_ , Liam's face wants to say. Harry can read it in dark eyes narrowing the more Liam's patience wanes. 

“Could you...not,” Harry says a bit lame. “For one night, could you not?”

Liam pretty much shuts the door in his face, leaving Harry red-faced and palm stinging from hitting it so hard. The music comes back on again, rhythm plucking Harry to the very core, only it's quieter now. Quiet enough that the walls no longer shake and something in Harry uncoils. 

That same week, Harry has had enough of the thumping club that now exists across from his room but hasn't regathered the courage to bust Liam's door down and demand some peace, and maybe some attention. If he has to listen to Holy Grail one more damn time, Harry might snap and throw them both from the roof. 

As it stands, Harry escapes to the only place he doesn't have to hear it while also not forcing him to go outside. Harry sits on the metal spiral staircase outside their front door that leads to the roof. The ceiling here is made of glass, and maybe if the sky were clearer, if London weren't London and people didn't fog up the air with the carelessness of living, maybe Harry would be able to see more than a few dots forming a barely there constellation. 

He doesn't notice the tap of feet falling against stairs until Zayn is standing right in front of him, hands in pockets and hair all windswept and messy. Harry resists the urge to sneer, pulling one knee up against his chest and resting his chin atop it. Zayn scratches at his brow as if the press of so many thoughts are fit to burst from his head, searching for a way to form between them. All Harry does sit there, because if he has nothing to say to Liam, the boy he's known since he was a kid-sized gobshite, then there's even less he has to talk about with Zayn.

It's funny how that factors little to Harry's mouth, though. “I see someone's ready to eat crow.” 

“You're a coward.”

“I know,” Harry says, because he is. It's taken him all this time, but he's made peace with it. Harry will never be the one to jump first, too frightened of what might lay at the bottom, too afraid of being broken. Harry is the one who writes in his journals and hides in stairwells and avoids saying what he really means, or saying anything at all for that matter. Harry leans his forehead against the balustrade, fitting Zayn in the spaces and looking at him through the freezing metal bars.

Harry motions toward the front door, or at least he thinks he does. It's difficult to tell what's moving in this godawful cold. “It's open,” he says.

Zayn doesn't need to be told twice, just as eager to get out of sharing anything with Harry, not even a conversation. He pauses though. Harry sees him, hand on the doorknob, sees the way his shoulders tense up under the velvety leather of his jacket. 

“He talks about you all the time, y'know,” it comes out so soft Harry almost doesn't hear him. Zayn catches his stare from over his shoulder. “He actually cares about you. God knows why.”

“Thank you. Thank you for that,” Harry speaks wryly, not feeling one bit better. Though he suspects that wasn't Zayn's intention anyway.

\- - -

Zayn will mention it one day, at some far off time and far off place. When the lines in their face draw deep valleys in their skin and push at their jowls. He'll say to Harry, “Y'know, that's not what that means.”

And when Harry looks at him, wildly overgrown eyebrows taking up almost the entirety of the top half of his face. Zayn will roll his eyes, and take a long drag of his Dunhill Red and shake his head. 

“Eat crow,” Zayn will clarify, rubbing at his greying temple. 

“I'm sorry, where is this coming from?”

“It's been bothering me all these years.”

“And?” Harry won't see the point. 

“You're a writer, aren't you,” Zayn will say, and that will be the end of that. Because, yes, Harry is a writer, and that apparently means he has no excuse. 

Or, at least, that's how Harry imagines it. 

\- - -

He's shaken awake, Liam a blurry figure kneeling in front of him. Harry pulls in an icy breath, drawing his duvet tight around him. His fists feel frozen closed, clenched around the edge of the thick blanket, brushing against his toes that are numb enough that Harry doesn't even feel it. Something is wrong, and it's more than just Liam's hand on his shoulder, and his dark eyes boring into him.

“Harry.” He says it like a secret, like a caress.

“Liam,” Harry whispers. “I'm cold.”

“I know.” Liam's hand runs down Harry's covered arm, trailing dull heat over him leaving an ache in the pit of his stomach. “The heating's off.”

Harry stares at him bleary-eyed, his form becoming sharper in the dark of the living room. There's only starlight above, moon having bid farewell to the sky hours ago and leaving it for the morning soon to come. Liam's hair sticks up at all ends, sleep rumpled and proof of restless tossing and turning. There are dark circles under his eyes, like shadows swirling beneath ice, dark with water and salt and blood. And Harry thinks back on his cousin, and being punched in a snow covered garden, and slipping on ice, and the cold daylight, and quiet streets. 

He's always looking up, at the sky, at Liam. Like if he looks hard enough he might hang Liam's constellation there. Burn a path in the heavens that'll always lead him home. 

“It's broken, I think.”

It would explain why Harry's back feels as if he's leaning on a glacier. He's fallen asleep here, again. With his things all around him, shattered into artful little pieces, filled with bits of his soul. His soul with Liam painted all over it. God, he's so oblivious and afraid and fucking _cold_.

Liam rises like a fog lifts above the city, gazing down at him calmly. “Go to bed, before you catch something, innit.”

“Can't move,” Harry says into his knees. Getting up seems an impossible task. “Let me die here.”

“Harry,” Liam sighs. 

He grabs onto Harry by his wrists, hot hands wrapping firm around his flesh, lifting Harry from the floor with relative ease. The duvet slips from his shoulders as Harry tumbles into Liam all loose-limbed, arms draping around his neck, face pushed into Liam's collarbone, the bump of it fitting into the seam of Harry's lips. Nothing feels alive, in this cold, except Liam, blood rushing like magma beneath his skin, heat pouring off him and into Harry's frozen body. 

They stand there silently, Liam's hand coming to rest on Harry's hip, thumb pressing into bone like there's a mark to be made. Like Liam isn't already all over him, stained into Harry's flesh. Liam's pulse jumps beneath Harry's mouth, his heart rattling between them like quakes against his ribcage. Or is it Harry's heart shaking off the frost and the long night? He can't tell. 

_Why do you care? Why? God knows why._

“C'mon,” Liam says across the shell of his ear, kneeling to pick up Harry's comforter and pulling at his body until they're both moving into the corridor and down to their rooms. He leads Harry to bed, pushing both him and his blanket into the mattress without a word. And when he tries to leave, straightening up and turning to go, more quiet than any shadow Harry's ever seen, Harry grabs onto him, fingers grasping at the first thing they can reach. They close around the hem of Liam's t-shirt, warm, soft skin brushing against his knuckles. 

“What's wrong,” Liam asks in a murmur. 

He tugs at Liam, until he's sitting on the edge of Harry's bed, a look of concern passing over his face. “Don't leave,” Harry murmurs in return. “Please.”

_sand through fingers, through hourglasses, through eyes and dreams, and on hot southern shores beat by salty waves, and disappearing into the deep, in ocean storms, and squalls thrashing over water. eroding and eroding like Time tugs it by the leash. cracking me down the middle, you are—_

_….don't leave, don't leave, don't leave_

The moment it takes Liam to decide feels like an eternity bottled in glass, too fragile to touch for danger of breaking. And Harry edges at it, Liam's shirt twisted into his fingers like grabbing hold of ink and watching it drip to the floor, almost gone. But eventually Liam nods, slipping into Harry's bed as easily as if he always belonged there, whispers, “Okay.”

\- - -

The year before Liam goes to Malta with his family, is also the year he stops singing. 

They're all sitting at the obnoxiously long table in Stokesay's formal dining room, Harry and Liam kicking at one another under the table and giggling like children. Christmas has come and gone, and New Year's is upon them, inching toward January like death. It's only getting colder, to be honest, Harry having spent the last week curled up with Liam in _his_ bed, sharing heat like a secret. 

This old house is drafty, and his grandfather as miserly as they come, unwilling to outfit the decrepit place with real heating, or even warming rooms up by fireplace. They've more than enough wood, Harry has seen the stockpile himself. He might complain more if it didn't mean he got to listen to Liam whisper nightly into his ear, songs unraveling from his mouth like ribbon. 

He should have known it was coming, really, feeling his grandfather's eyes following him the entire holiday, narrowed imperceptibly in what Harry could only look back on as scrutiny. And it chases him whenever they might be in the same room, or on the same side of the house, or hell in the same country. Harry could be lounging by the beach in the Maldives, and he's sure he'd still feel his grandfather's eyes on him. 

"So, Liam," Harry's grandfather's voice stretches across the table, dragging everyone's eye to them at the end, both Harry and Liam freezing mid-laugh. Conversation quiets, but the scratch and squeak of cutlery on plates remains, underscoring the sudden silence of all those involved. "Your mother has told me you are nearly done with O-levels."

"GSCEs? Yeah, I've got final exams in a few months," Liam says uncertain as to where he might be led. Harry's grandfather has barely taken the time out of his day to greet Liam before, it's a wonder he's deigned to have a conversation with him over dinner, with a dozen other people watching. 

"You're doing well, I hope."

"Um, yeah. Expected all As and Bs so far," Liam says, hands restless in his lap as they curl and uncurl. 

Harry, noticing this, reaches for them, stilling them with his own, slotting their fingers together that they might calm. Liam turns to him with a smile, small and secret, squeezing Harry's hand and folding them together that he might will the cold away, for Harry's fingers are freezing. Burning up between Liam's hot palms. 

"Good, good. After highschool?"

Liam's expression clouds over, unsure of whether his walking through a field of flowers or mines, or perhaps both. "College, for A-levels, I guess," Liam answers. 

"Ah, yes. For what, I wonder."

"Music," Liam says, more firm than Harry thinks is the intention. 

"And, you like music?"

"Yes, of course."

"And after that?"

"University, _sir_."

"For _music_ , no doubt."

"If I decide so, yes."

It's like watching a tennis match, the moves of which have devolved into one words attacks slipped across the dinner table through slight of hand and tricky tonal shifts. All through it, Liam keeps a steady grip on his hand, Harry's grandfather volleying question after question toward him while the rest of them, unused to such displays, sink further and further down into their seat, those of which are mainly Liam's family. 

"You see," Harry's grandfather places his utensils at the side of his place, uncaring as to whether or not he dirties the tablecloth. "Harry is going to Oxford."

"That's news to me," Harry mutters, Liam's drawn face in dangerous of cracking another smile.

"Harry _will_ go to Oxford as his mother did before him, as did I before her, as my father did before me, and so on and so forth. People, like us, we attend Oxford. We leave with the promise of success and influence in our future. Parliament, and the House, and the ruling class in our country, are waiting for us. What I am trying to ascertain, Liam, dear boy, is where you might fit into that. Where will you, and your _music_ , be, I wonder?"

" _Dad_ ," Anne hisses at him, horrified and embarrassed all at once. 

And why shouldn't she be? They've invited the Paynes for Christmas at Stokesay for nearly four years now, to be treated thusly?

"Annie, let me make my point."

"I think your point has been made clear enough already," she snaps.

Only it's too late. The damage has been done. Liam stares down into half empty plate, face red, hand slipping from Harry's, sitting in silence for the rest of the dinner. And no matter how much Harry may nudge him, will flick his peas into Liam's ear or pinch at his side, Liam won't respond.

They leave in the morning, without fuss or even announcement, Liam slipping into Harry's room to wake him up and whisper a goodbye, bumping his forehead against Harry's temple. 

After that year, Liam and his family never come back to Stokesay Court, and no one could really blame them. 

\- - -

Harry still hasn't apologised.

It's the middle of January, and the heating is still off. Liam's probably called their landlord a dozen times over, leaving increasingly irate voice messages to no avail. In that time, Harry discovers what it means to slowly freeze to death, shuffling about his flat in as many pairs of socks that he can fit over his feet, hoodie zipped up on top of a thick knit jumper, hood pulled over his head so that the tips of his ears won't chip off. The cold is penetrating, fixing its way into the sinews and bone, sinking like cold steel in colder water, stabbing. 

It's hard to focus during lectures, the droning of his professors rising and falling like white noise in the background and by the time he gets to his last one, Harry has given up all pretence and scrolls through some aesthetic blog the whole class. He almost feels guilty throwing away so much money on an education he's not even paying attention to, but then, looking at what his grandparents slipped into his bank account for Christmas quickly reminds him that he doesn't have to care about such things. 

He runs into Niall how he always tends to during the week, on campus and after class, both of them walking up the quad to the tune of a free evening. Harry's on the phone when he does, assuring his mother that _yes_ he will call his grandparents and thank them, and _yes_ he's alright, and _no_ there is nothing wrong he just had too much coursework to get through to come home for the Hols. 

She takes his word for it, albeit reluctantly, after Harry sighs enough he puts her off prodding anymore.

"She's ya mam, Harry. She's allowed to worry," Niall tells him when they fall into step with each other, happening upon Tottenham Court Road after a few minutes. 

"Fair enough," Harry says, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets. "Do I have to like it though?"

"Nah, mate. But at least respect that she loves you enough to."

"Well when you put it that way," Harry says.

They wind up faffing about outside Goodge Street station, sharing cigarettes and chatting all types of bollocks. Harry suspects it's because Niall is avoiding getting back to his early and putting himself through watching Louis and Els snuggle up and snog in the living room, lips smacking louder than Niall has the constitution or patience for. Harry doesn't blame him, he knows exactly how Niall feels, even if in the vaguest sense.

It's not until rush hour, when people start coming and going in droves that they decide to move. Harry throws and arm over Niall's shoulder. "Come 'round mine?"

"Obviously," Niall says, and they make their way into Harry's neighbourhood, clinging to each other in the cold.

When nighttime rolls around and Niall falls face first into Harry's bed after too many pints and too many complaints about broken heating, when the frost blooms on the window in crystalline patterns across the glass, Harry sits on the edge of Liam's bed. He looks up at Liam with uncertainty. He's come home late smelling like smoke and warmth, throwing his bag at Harry's feet and unbuttoning his coat. Liam sighs, which is something Harry is very used to hearing. But still, he nods, reluctant in the face of the inevitable. 

Harry crawls up Liam's bed, and under the covers, watching while Liam opens up his laptop and throws himself into schoolwork. Every so often, he'll glance Harry's direction, eyebrows knit together in concentration and befuddlement, hand resting in the crease of his politics book. 

Liam hasn't always been the best at school. But what he lacks in natural affinity for absorbing useless factoids on democracy in the 20th Century West, he makes up for in sheer stubbornness. It takes him all night to finish an essay, Harry observing from his spot beneath the covers. But Liam doesn't stop until every relevant chapter is read and every line deconstructed and regurgitated and reformed into something Liam's professors might deem acceptable. 

Harry moves in and out of sleep, consciousness receding to the patter of keys and turning pages. And when the bed dips, covers coming up and Liam sliding in, Harry shivers. 

“Do you like Zayn?”

“No. I don't.”

Sometimes he wonders who asked. The answer is still the same.

\- - -

The hour grows late, and the moon crosses its zenith through the dark ocean of night, shafts of white light peeking through the curtains to crawl silently across the floor. They're in Harry's bed this time, shoulders pressed together as long breaths pass between them and the heat rolls against their skin like a fever.

Harry's on to something, he knows. Lurking there in the valleys and the shadows, secrets whispered like wind whirling quietly in the bottoms of their hearts. And when he faces Liam, Harry can swear he can hear it, thumping deep and low.

“What's wrong,” Liam asks, eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as he rolls over so that they can face each other. 

“I thought you weren't coming back.” Harry's spent so long floundering and losing himself, and losing Liam, that baring his weaknesses in the cover of night, in the dark, hot space they share is minuscule to the empty space Liam might leave. 

“Why?”

“Because of me. Because I'm stupid.”

Liam frowns. “You are kind of stupid, aren't you?”

Harry pinches him in the side, Liam squirming away and taking the covers with the twist of his body. Harry only follows him, follows the heat until they're both pushed up on one side of the bed. Harry grasps on to him, pushing his forehead into the firm warmth of Liam's sternum. And it's like they're children again, hiding beneath the covers from a cold, unforgiving world. They've spent so long playing catch, and chasing Liam is the only feeling he knows, but it's making Harry sick every time they slip from each other like water between fingers. 

“I mean, what the hell,” Liam asks into the top of Harry's head.

“I'm always trying to figure you out.” Harry covers Liam's mouth before he can say anything, watches him deflate, blowing damp air into Harry's palms. “It's not an excuse, it's an explanation.” 

Enough words have come from Harry's fingers that amount to nothing if he can't say them out loud. He looks into Liam's narrowed eyes, seeing in them the roiling he knows so well. “I wanted to be closer to you somehow. I wanted you to notice me,” Harry says, voice raspy.

“I always notice you. I've noticed you for ten years. Shagging my best mate wouldn't have done anything. It didn't do anything.”

“I wish I'd known that,” Harry wants to laugh, only his chest weighs heavy with something like regret. “I should've known that.”

“You big dope,” Liam says thickly. 

He slips into his dreams with Liam's lips pressed soft against his forehead, breath ghosting over Harry's face like a spring wind swooping from the south to banish the winter. 

\- - -

Harry discovers something new about Liam everyday. It's been that way for as long as he can remember. Little things reveal themselves over time, unfolding in front of Harry like lilies in a pond. And more and more, Harry loses his reflection in the water, but watches as ripples smooth out onto the edges and light falls through the surface and the bottom slowly makes sense. 

But still, he hasn't found what he's looking for.

\- - -

When Harry wakes up it's to an empty bed and the covers tucked underneath him on all sides. The flat is still cold as hell, so he gets up clinging to his duvet, the sun still resting just below the horizon. He follows the smell of ground coffee beans and toast to find Liam sitting at the breakfast table with his satchel on the chair next to him. Harry blinks against the fluorescent light, painting the kitchen a tinge of green that sort of makes both of them look ill, eyes welling and aching, sniffling as he passes Liam toward the fridge. 

He stands in front of it forever (or maybe just five minutes) debating whether or not he'll get frostbite just reaching for the door handle. And if his arms don't fall off from the cold, whether or not he's willing to add to it for the prospect of a full stomach. He's not even that hungry, he argues with his growling belly. What right does it have to fuss?

“You usually have to take the food out first, before you're able to eat,” Liam says, which Harry makes a point to ignore. 

“What awful class is dragging you out of the house at such an ungodly hour?”

Liam is fucking around with his mobile, fingers tapping erratically against the screen, typing out some long message to some other sorry sod up this early. “No class,” Liam says. “Just the gym. And then lunch with Zayn.”

“Jesus, Liam. Term just started,” Harry shifts from foot to foot, bare soles swelling with pain on the cold tile.

Liam hums his agreement. “Yes, Harry. It has.”

Harry bites his lip, chapped skin nearly break between his teeth. 

“I never said I'm sorry,” Harry tells him, back turned to Liam, unable to face the shame of his fuck ups, can't even make sense of the fact he feels shame to begin with. 

At first, Liam doesn't saying anything, and it's long enough that Harry looks over his shoulder to peek at what's awaiting him, if Liam even heard him. He must have. He's staring at his phone as if it's a million miles away, and Harry's the one who took it there. Like there's nothing in his hands at all, like he's lost. 

“Okay,” he finally says, stashing his mobile in his pocket. He collects his crumb covered plate and half-empty mug, brushing past Harry to place them in the sink.

“Okay,” Harry questions as Liam grips his satchel. “Thats...that's it?”

“What do you want me to say, Harry,” Liam rounds on him, voice barely above a hush, but to Harry it might as well be a wave, crashing and rushing over him like a cacophony. “Harry, you're my best friend. But what you did was really fucked, and I'm still angry. What do you want me to say?”

Harry shakes his head, “Nothing. I didn't mean it like that,” he murmurs, gaze falling downward as his fists clench into his duvet. 

“Well, stop fucking people around,” Liam says. “So the rest of us can figure out what you _do_ mean.”

He leaves in a whirlwind, or that's what it feels like, gone almost in a blink, Harry standing alone listening to his own harsh breathing. 

\- - -

The fireplace is not easy to light, mostly because Harry's never lit one by himself before. He fumbles with the lighter for a few minutes, staring at the stack of free newspapers he has collected, one for everytime he rides the tube and yet somehow never manages to read. The crosswords are all finished though, through no fault of his own, Harry half finishing them before hurrying off to class or to his laptop, words bursting at the seam of his mind. It's Liam, who comes behind Harry, very likely sighing, and getting distracted by finishing them on his way to tossing it in their small recycle pile in the corner of the kitchen. 

Harry has one such newspaper balled up in his numb fingers, holding the lighter to it and watching the flame dance and jump onto the thin crinkled paper. For awhile only the edges burn, turning black and fizzling out in seconds, and he'll light it again until the flame grows and Harry has to throw it under the bundle of old, dry wood he found in the hall closet. It crawls across the bark, dust lighting up and filling his nostrils. And it's a slow burn, crackling in the grate like bones splitting against stone and mistakes breaking his body. 

It grows, Harry throwing some more newspaper at it, ink lost to flame and wood glowing hot, smoking pluming out the sides and creeping along the brick. 

And Harry sits back, bum hitting the floor and back hitting the coffee table, punching a breath he didn't even realise he was holding from his chest. The heat is coming in billows now, washing over him and easing the prickling chill from his skin. His eyes begin to sting, his vision blurring fiery and orange, flickering like light underneath water. He presses the heel of his hands to them, wetness blooming beneath his palms as he takes on unsteady breath. 

“Fuck,” he whispers fiercely. 

He is fucked. He is so fucked. 

Tears spill hot over his cheeks, and he feels like he can't catch his breath, chest rising and falling like it's racing to pull him apart. The middle of him tight and twitching, Harry chokes out, feeling kindling beneath his ribs. He rubs roughly at his eyes and runny nose, his throat burning the more he tries to chase a breath. 

A shrieking slices through the flat, Harry jumping to cover his ears, wincing as every shrill chirp bleeds through his hands and make his ears throb. He coughs, looking for the source of the sound, stumbling to his feet, nearly tripping and knocking himself unconscious on the mantle. 

The fire burns calmly, serene as Harry coughs just looking at it. Smoke fills the flat and the fire alarm screams at him. Harry hurries to the kitchen, darting to and fro for anything that might hold water. He grabs onto the kettle, dashing as cold water spills from the spout and runs under foot. The floor comes at him quickly, and Harry doesn't know what's louder, the kettle breaking half his fall and splitting down the middle, or Harry's knee cracking against the tile. This is how Liam discovers him, crouched low and hissing in pain, broken kettle still clutched in his hand, fire alarm on a mission to make both of them go deaf. 

“Harry, what the hell?”

Liam makes quick work of the fire, retrieving a jug from a bottom cabinet and filling it with water, tossing it over the burning wood and drowning it dead. “Help me, numpty,” Liam shouts over the alarm, spurring Harry into action.

Quick as they can, he and Harry both move to the window, pain shooting through Harry's leg as they open the window wide. Fresh air barrels in, hitting him in the face and making his eyes sting. Though vexed, for very different reasons, together they bounce from window to window, throwing them open too and fanning wildly with their hands at the grey smoke.

When the flat is mostly clear, and they meet again in the living room, they sigh in relief, the alarm finally dying off. Harry, caught in a fit of coughs, hears Liam sigh. If he could, Harry'd sell his entire soul to never hear it again. 

“There's a reason the landlord told us not to use the fireplace, you donut.”

“I figured he was being a wanker.”

“The shaft is sealed up,” Liam explains exasperatedly. “Why do you think _I_ told you not to use it?”

“I thought—“ Harry coughs again, throat closing up around his words. “— _you_ were being a wanker.”

With the fire put out and the windows wide open, the flat feels as if the Arctic has stolen into their home and made a place for itself in the brick and wood, cutting at them as if they're the ones trespassing. Harry shivers, his skin pulled tight across his face, knee throbbing in agony, and tear tracks dried, staining his cheeks. Liam rolls his eyes, fingers rubbing at his temple. 

“I really don't know what to do with you,” he says, leading Harry to the couch, firm hand pushing into his lower back, carefully moving around the room as Harry limps. 

“Sit,” Liam orders, tone offering no room for debate. He covers Harry in blankets, palms slipping over him, over his shoulders, down his arms, smoothing the thick fabric over Harry's shivering form as his eyebrows meet at the knit in the middle of his brow. “Restrain yourself from starting anymore fires, please.” 

"If I must," Harry gets out before hacking up the rest of his insides, throat dry and rough as sandpaper. It scratches like so many things crammed underneath so many layers and so many years of circumvention.

The setting sun seems distant now, ever crawling to the dark parts of the world, and leaving shadows in its trail. Their shadows, they grow longer with time, like sad old stories told in the floorboards. Harry watches Liam's cross his when he gets up and goes to the kitchen, and wishes for one brief moment that he was a spectre, or a shade, or anything without boundary or border or edge, that they may exist in the same place.

He listens to Liam making phonecalls, sinking into the sofa as Liam's low voice navigates a litany of pleasantries and apologies to the neighbours. Harry slips into a half-there state, arms folded over himself with the blankets wrapped taut around him, eyes drooping. His chest seizes with aborted coughs that jab at his consciousness and keep him from falling into a complete slumber. 

It's not long before Liam is standing in front of him again, more tricksy and light-footed than anyone gives him credit for. For Harry doesn't hear him approach, the lull in noise washing over him in a silent deluge, the phantom screaming of the alarm still worming its way into his eardrum. 

In his hand, Liam holds a glass of water, half-filled and angled toward Harry in offering. He speaks when Harry takes it, cold knuckles slipping from under his hands and making way for colder glass. 

"You alright?"

"My hero," Harry says, cringing as condensation slides beneath his fingers. 

"Talked to the landlord." He crosses his arms over his chest. "Talked to some people..."

"Apologised to some people, you mean?"

"That too," Liam nods. 

If his voice weren't so gentle, Harry could almost mistake it for a scolding. All the pieces are in the right place, the players hitting their usual marks. It should be exhausting by now, to get told off so often, but Harry can't find it in himself to care. He is miserable, and cold, and Liam is so close and the heat is radiating off him enough that Harry wants to curl at his feet like a cat. 

Maybe Liam is psychic, or perhaps Harry is just that transparent, because Liam sinks in the sofa next to him, draping an arm over Harry's shuddering form. "Some pipes burst," he explains, grip tightening the harder Harry shakes. And bless him, he thinks it's because Harry is cold. Which is not a lie, but is bespoke in half-truth more still, Harry unwilling to reveal those parts of himself yet. Liam continues, Harry listening for the deep of his words, how they rest somewhere in the bottom of his throat the quieter he is. "The entire top floors have no heat. You're the third fire alarm today."

"Oh?"

"I guess you're not the only one who doesn't listen."

"Hey," Harry narrows his eyes. "I listen."

"Yes, I believe you," Liam smirks, not even attempting to sound genuine. 

Harry elbows him for his cheek, right in the softest bit of his ribs and Liam returns the favour in kind. And it quickly devolves from there, Harry tugging at Liam's ears when he flicks at Harry's nose. The tussle about for a bit, Harry attempting to shove him off the sofa and Liam determined to bring Harry with him. He only gets so far as to get Liam half off, bracing himself by his foot, slip sliding along the wood floor with the ends of the blanket. 

But soon, so typical and not at all shameful to have been upended so fast, Liam has him pinned to the couch, pushing Harry's face into the cushions and having him begging for mercy.

"You're not supposed to hurt the poorly," Harry complains, voice muffled.

"You're right," Liam agrees, slipping behind him with a sigh. 

Harry turns and turns until his back is pressed against Liam's chest, grabbing at his hand so that it rests flat against his sternum. 

"Harry," Liam breathes, the air ruffling Harry's hair like a caress. "What are you doing," he asks, something lost in his words. "What am _I_ doing?"

"Staying," Harry whispers, like maybe he can convince more than just himself.

\- - -

“Do you hate me now?”

Behind him Liam lets out a breath, chest retreating from Harry's back only to rise again. Waves on a shoreline, Harry thinks. And gospel, and everything he knows but can't explain. It's a familiar sensation, forgotten from long ago when there was only certainty that Liam would always be there, an arm's length within reach. Like the tide coming and going, but never so far that the sea's no longer there. Gone days, where summer lingered only a little while, but seemed to stretch on endless.

“Define 'hate',” Liam says into the back of his neck. He's so hot behind Harry, there must be something under it, whorls of anger lurking beneath the surface. Those mysteries, eddies of the past forming a picture that makes no sense. 

“I'm serious. Do you hate me now?” Harry sits up, hips slotting into the fold of Liam, lower back touching Liam's tummy as Harry looks down at him in consternation. He grips Liam's knee, might he sink into despair and have nothing to keep him afloat. 

“I've known you forever.”

Is forever enough though? They can spend lifetimes searching for a way to make their ends meet, looking for the parts of them that fit, and come up with mismatched edges and a friendship that couldn't survive the fractures and stress from rubbing one another wrong for so many years.

“That doesn't really answer my question,” Harry tries to keep himself from sounding like he's complaining. 

Liam, maybe so exhausted with this conversations, tired of Harry always prodding, has all his attention on the sopping and scorched pile of rubble sitting in the fireplace. 

“I don't have an answer to your question,” he says, almost in disbelief, perhaps having never even thought about it before.

“A simple 'yes' or 'no' would suffice.”

“That would imply my response is simple.”

“How can it be anything but?”

Circles. They run around each other in an endless chase and Harry's convinced that all they're doing is waiting for the other to drop. And all this time, he's thought Liam's innards were all on display for him, only to realise he's been the open book this whole time. He's been a show of weaknesses, clinging to his vices so that they might never look so obvious. Hearing it from Nick and Louis a dozen times over does nothing to stifle the soft shock in the most sensitive part of his side. The one Liam brushes his fingers against, pulling a shivering Harry down onto the sofa. 

Harry didn't realise. He doesn't realise a lot of things, and it's bewildering to not know if it's because he feels cold or he is cold. Liam's arms encircling him commits the thoughts to dust, warmth spreading through Harry's body as they settle around his middle. 

“In a lot of ways,” Liam says.

“Please, enlighten me.”

“Figure it out yourself.”

And maybe Liam smiles, secretly pressing it into the place where his neck on shoulder meet.

\- - -

They tumble forward on a grassy knoll, laughter drowning out the noise of their young bodies hitting the ground with muted thuds. He lands starfished and breathless, and for a second, all Harry can see is white. It's not until he can discern cloud from sky from muggy city air, that he notices Liam spitting grass and dirt from his scraped lips all down Harry's front. “Ew! Liiiaaamm,” Harry howls, struggling beneath him while their friends take pause in the distance, most likely groaning impatiently. 

It's not unusual for Liam to get him on the ground, pinning him down with all the force of a rhino, knowing Harry would never be able to upend him regardless. Harry may be slick, but he's pretty much done for once you get him stuck. At that point, he'll whine until he's let up, because nothing works better against dumb, brutish force than irritation. This is exactly why Harry doesn't like tag.

“Oh, C'mon Harry,” Liam giggles, Harry slapping his hands away and attempting to wriggle from under him. 

“You'll get my jumper dirty, dummy!”

It might just be too late for that, he thinks, his back already feeling cold and moist, Liam agreeing by wiping his hands all along Harry's belly, dirt streaking across the fabric of his hoodie while Liam grins at him smugly. No twelve year old should be that proud of themselves, especially after defiling their best friend. It takes a punch in the arm for Liam to stop, Harry swiping him with enough force to get his point across, and glaring at him with all the fire he can muster.

“Okay, okay,” Liam backs off, looming over Harry with hands on his knees. He rises smoothly, stepping backward as Harry follows him to crowd him once again, dusting Harry off but only succeeding in making things worse. 

“Ugh, _Liam_.” 

“ _Sorry, sorry_ ,” Liam apologises again, backing off once more, letting Harry brush himself down. 

There's grass stains on his trousers, brown and green all down his side. When Harry looks at his friend, Liam seems truly shamefaced, though that won't save Harry the embarrassment of walking about school for the rest of the day looking like some wild overgrown infant. 

Still, he allows himself to be dragged into a hug by Liam, flopping into his arms pouting silently. 

“Sorry, Haz. I love you,” Liam whispers past the shell of his ear. 

The words circle in his head, rooting him to the spot as Liam squeezes tight enough to rob the breath from his body. "Well, I hate you," Harry rasps. 

“Sorry,” Liam says again. “Also. You're it.”

Liam shoves him by the shoulder with enough force that Harry stumbles back, making a quick escape on a string of cackles and their friends throwing their hands up in relief. 

Harry though, winds into himself tighter and feels his fingers twitch.

\- - -

The memory is so clear in his mind, it's almost as if he wrote it himself, every line etched into his being and poured onto paper. It's all he can see in this dark, save for Liam's face pillowed next to his, Harry reeling and unravelling like a revelation. 

“Liam.” He says it like a prayer that only the heavens may hear; with his soul, and everything pumping inside him. 

“Hm?”

With his heart gathered up in his throat and , Harry asks, “Can I kiss you?”

“Okay.”

Harry reaches out for him, slowly, hesitantly, like Liam is just a dream. He rests his hand on the angle of Liam's jaw, fingers curving into the hollow beneath his ear. He takes his time, looks at Liam intently, still trying to figure him out. Trying to capture the moment in words, in his head, in something permanent.

He leans forward and presses his lips against Liam's, a small pressure, pulling back, still confused why he doesn't feel different.

“Tosser,” Liam sighs, pulling at Harry's ears and moving in to press hungrily at his mouth. 

And that low simmering thing, burrowed in the deepest parts of him, flame hot and burning his insides slick and wet like Liam's tongue running along his lips, opening Harry up. Searing, and blooming and crumpling as if he were on fire. He very well may be, he feels it racing through his veins, the scorch of Liam's lips like a brand as he nips along Harry's jaw. 

"Liam," gasps Harry, hand sliding down his side, Liam's fingers gripping Harry's hip while the other runs over his brow, his cheeks, his jaw, Liam breaking from Harry, breathing harsh and fierce as a whip while his hands seek all the skin he can touch. He stares at Harry with pupils blown wide, pressing his fingers into Harry's skin. 

"Yeah?" 

He sounds like he almost doesn't believe he has Harry there, like a dream has spilled into the dark night to dance and revel before him and wriggle beneath his bedsheets. 

"Liam," Harry says again, letting the weight of it replace everything and anything that might have crossed his tongue, lets the heat of Liam pressing into him settle into his cold bones, devouring every second as if it mightn't come again. 

And Liam swallows his own name, over and over, until all that's left is Harry's soft, breathy moans sticking holes in the silence. 

\- - -

They don't talk about it, because they never talk about anything. It's probably something they should work on. 

\- - -

Tonight is the coldest it's ever been, but Liam's hands against him, are hot.

Snow begins to settle on the sill of Harry's window, first at the corners, where flakes don't easily fall off. 

And Liam, he settles between Harry's legs, peppering kisses all along his face like a spiral leading directly to Harry's mouth. When he reaches there, hot breath mingling in the space between their lips, Liam closes the gap, pressing himself into Harry's body from tip to toe. Harry wants. He's wanted for so long, everything unnamed and unclear making themselves known in the way he moans 'Liam', and the arch of his back as he tries to break himself apart, lets his molecules and atoms reform themselves around Liam until they're one. 

Liam's hands trail down his body, leaving him ablaze and molten as he arrives to Harry's tenting boxers. Harry is so hard, as Liam rubs against his dick through the thin fabric, damp spot growing at the head, dark and warm. "Liam," Harry whines, grabbing onto Liam's wrist and holding his hand there, firm and still as Harry thrusts against it. "Liam, _please_."

He sucks at Harry's neck, pale skin bruising between his teeth, Harry squirming that he might catch Liam's lips again. Liam slips a hand beneath the waistband of Harry's underwear, and Harry watches him press at his straining erection, fingers dancing over the sensitive flesh. He gets Harry's boxers off in one swift move, tossing them somewhere behind him that may or may not be Harry's desk.

Harry's dick throbs under Liam's hands, precum pooling at his belly, Liam pulling gently at his foreskin and rubbing at his shiny cockhead with rough thumbs. "Fuck," Harry says on an elongated hiss, Liam's fingers circling his shaft, moving to press along the underside, squeezing Harry by the base. 

"Is this what you did to Zayn," Liam asks quietly, no less focused on the stretch and thrum of Harry's body, Harry who twitches beneath Liam at the words, face burning as he nods. "Is this how you touched him?" Liam bites his way down Harry's torso, licking at his skin while Harry runs his fingers through Liam's short hair, grasping for purchase. "Is this how you wanted to touch me," Liam murmurs into the dip at Harry's hip, nosing his way along the sharp bone until he's sucking a mark into the inside of his thigh, right where it meets the rest of his body.

And Harry knows it'll stay there for a long time, secret and tender, his own fingers finding it every time he tosses off to the memory of this. Of Liam engulfing his dick while he cries out at the tight, wet heat winding around him. 

"Fuck, Liam. _Yeah_."

He bucks up into Liam's mouth, his lips stretched around Harry, cheeks hollowing out as he sucks. But Liam holds him down, arm bracing against Harry's hips as he swallows Harry whole until his nose is touching the curls at the base of his dick. Harry groans, and soon Liam is bobbing up and down Harry's cock, the wet slide of his lips making Harry twitch as he watches himself disappear over and over. 

"How long have you wanted this," Liam asks raspily, hand a blur as he jerks Harry off, the soft schlick of his dick in Liam's moving fist, burrowing deep in Harry's ears. "How long have you wanted _me_?"

"Alwuggghh," guttural moan taking hold of Harry as his orgasm draws near. "Always. I always wanted you."

"Good," Liam says, deep and low. "That's good." 

Harry comes with Liam's hand on him, roping hot and white across his belly and chest, pouring over Liam's knuckles as he strokes Harry's twitching cock. It's like Liam touching him makes it last forever, Harry's body strung tight as a bow, hips lifting off the mattress and into Liam's burning hand. 

When it's over, when Harry is spent, Liam collapses atop him, dick still hard and straining against his pyjama bottoms. Harry helps him slip them off, legs hooking around Liam's waist while they lay there. His cock sits next to Harry's, thick and long and stiff, dragging across his skin slowly, Liam pressing their hips together like he can eliminate all the space between. "I've always wanted you," Liam murmurs into Harry's neck, tangling his fingers in Harry's hair, pushing his lips against the pulsing vein there. "I always want you."

Outside it's snowing, powdering London white and turning the grimy, grey city into something delicate. And that night, Liam fucks into him slow and steady, filling Harry up and rubbing his insides raw, until Harry comes again and Liam smiles broad and bright into Harry's mouth. 

Harry's waited all this time to breathe, hasn't known what it meant till now.

\- - -

In the morning, Harry watches Liam get ready for class.

He slinks into Liam's room while he's in the shower, propping himself against the short headboard with blankets strewn all around him, several of which cover him entirely. The morning is grey as ever, and the chill still gnaws at his edges like a hungry animal. Except now, Harry doesn't notice so much, with Liam dropping his towel in front of Harry and (unfortunately) slipping on a clean pair of pants. 

Liam moves about the room, steadily amassing layers of clothes so that he may venture out into the cold world unharmed. 

“I lied.”

Liam's brows pinch together and he looks at Harry with confusion in his eyes. “What about?”

“You." 

He stops at the foot of the bed, even more confused now, though Harry suspects he might not ever stop being confused by him. Because Harry has yet to figure Liam out at all, but he also feels like he might have an entire life to find out. 

"And me," Harry continues. "And what we mean."

"Okay," Liam says slowly.

“C'mere.” Harry reaches from him, arm outstretched. Liam stares at him warily, nonetheless looking warm and comfy in his thick jumper and baggy jeans. 

“What's wrong," he asks, resting a knee on the bed, Harry rolling into the dip the slightest bit. 

“Nothing." Harry pulls Liam back into bed. He yelps, Harry's arms locking around him as he falls on top of Harry and the mountain of sheets he's currently calling his home. “Don't want you to go,” Harry says, pushing himself up into Liam's lips, sheets slipping from around him and resting at his waist.

“I have a lecture in half an hour," Liam says between kisses, Harry drawing at his mouth languidly.

“I'll freeze to death without you," Harry pronounces. He's rather sure it's true, seeing as that's what was happening before Liam got his hands on him all those years ago. 

“Drama queen.”

Harry slips a hand into Liam's jeans, and feels him flinch.

“What?”

“Cold hands,” Liam says, reasonably distracted, eyes glazing over. 

"Not for long."

For the first time, he doesn't write, not because he doesn't have anything to say, but because he doesn't feel the need to say anything at all.

They don't fit. It doesn't matter, though, because they build bridges. And all along the crack they're connected by these tiny things that hold them together. And Harry's figured out that all he needs to do is walk across. Meet Liam in the middle, and stand over the chasm together.

\- - -

Harry slides across the icy pavement, feet flying from under him, wind knocked from him when he lands straight on his back. The only thing he hears in his daze is snow crunching against boots, flecks of slush and grit splattering his coat as a shadow casts over him.

A hand appears in front of him, fingers wide open in a welcome Harry did not expect. He follows the hand to the arm it belongs to, and the arm to the shoulder, and to the neck, and toward the face, and into the brownest eyes Harry has ever seen. 

“You alright,” a voice asks softly. 

Harry nods, gripping the hand outstretched before him, warm fingers tangling with his own. 

“I'm Liam.”

His world shifts sideways, and Harry knows nothing else again. 

\- - -

...love. Maybe.

This is not the beginning, though it very nearly is:

There once was a boy who looked up...

**Author's Note:**

> ust a few things before i take up any more of your time:
> 
> -if you're curious as to what harry and liam's building looks like, the address is **Tower House, 2 Candover Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W7DQ**. it's the red and black brick one, with the windows going all the way up the middle from the front door. fitzrovia, in general, is a lovely, older neighbourhood just north of oxford street (the busiest shopping street in europe, for those of you wanting to know) and south of euston train station. it's also, despite it's location, relatively quiet, as well as quietly expensive. the streets are somewhat narrow, and there isn't much going on beyond an abundance of historical pubs, some nice places to walk, and a lowkey celeb or two heading down to their local for a pint or a chat or sommit. 
> 
> the exact flat that they live in (flat 12 to be precise) is not as big as it may seem, and could barely fit 30 people in it much less 200 partygoers. but i love the neighbourhood so much, and i felt it fit the needs of the narrative and the characters that i couldn't resist embellishing a just little. 
> 
> -although the art gallery white cube still exists, it has moved from hoxton square in shoreditch, east london, and split into two separate locations, one on bermondsey street and one in mason yard. even though i haven't visited the new (well relatively new) locations, i would recommend anyone interested in contemporary, mixed media, and experimental art head over to the website or even go down and take a look if possible. they exhibit some brilliant stuff.
> 
> -for anyone wondering what harry's grandparents' house looked like, it actually exists, and is really named stokesay court in onibury, shropshire. in reality, it was passed on to the niece of the 2nd magnus baronet of tangley hill. 
> 
> -the london library, the one which harry would most certainly not be allowed near any original literature manuscripts without special permission, is at 14 st james square. it's charity run, meaning it runs on membership fees, donations, etc and currently has over 1 million books in stock, the majority of which are open shelf. the 6th floor is where the theology section used to be (as i think they've moved it) and is probably one of the most quiet places in london, if you ask me. 
> 
> if you guys have any questions or comments you can always leave them here or, if you'd like, you can swing by my [tumblr](http://scrybles.tumblr.com).


End file.
